Amazon develops a robot that ‘feels’ touch, just like its human workers

Amazon has announced a new AI-infused warehouse robot that it says has a sense of touch. This allows the Vulcan robot to pick and stow roughly three-quarters of the items stocked in the company’s warehouses, a task that was previously handled predominantly by human workers.

“Vulcan represents a fundamental leap forward in robotics,” says Aaron Parness, Amazon’s director of applied science, in a press release. “It’s not just seeing the world, it’s feeling it, enabling capabilities that were impossible for Amazon robots until now.”

Vulcan is not Amazon’s first robot capable of picking items up, but it is the first that’s dextrous and sensitive enough to maneuver goods inside the compact, fabric-covered compartments that the company uses for storage — which are themselves already moved around warehouses by a different fleet of robots. Vulcan uses an arm that Amazon says “resembles a ruler stuck onto a hair straightener” to rearrange any items already in a compartment and add new ones, with force sensors that help it know when it makes contact with an object and how much force and speed to use to avoid causing damage. A second arm includes a suction cup to grab anything it wants to take out of the pods, with an AI-powered camera to make sure that it hasn’t picked up multiple items by mistake.

AI is integrated throughout Vulcan’s systems, which were trained on physical data including touch and force feedback. It also “learns from its own failures,” building up an understanding of how different objects behave when touched, so Amazon hopes Vulcan will become more capable over time.

Amazon says that Vulcan is already operational in Spokane, Washington, and Hamburg, Germany, where it’s processed half a million orders so far, and is primarily being used to pick items at the top and bottom of the eight-foot fabric stacks. That saves human workers from bending down or fetching ladders, which Amazon argues will improve worker safety and reduce injuries. Vulcan can apparently pick around 75 percent of Amazon’s stock, and will alert a human when it finds something it can’t pick up. “Vulcan works alongside our employees, and the combination is better than either on their own,” says Parness.

“I don’t believe in 100 percent automation,” says Parness in an interview with CNBC that demonstrates Vulcan’s capabilities. “If we had to get Vulcan to do 100 percent of the stows and picks, it would never happen.”

That could be cold comfort to the company’s one million warehouse workers, who may soon be outnumbered by the 750,000 robots Amazon says it’s deployed over the years. Vulcan will now join them, rolling out across Europe and the United States “over the next couple of years.”