Amazon’s new robot, Sparro, a mechanical arm that handles and classifies products – EUROPE PRESS
BOSTON (UNITED STATES), Nov. 11 (Portaltic/EP) –
Amazon welcomes in Westborough, a town near the city of Boston (Massachusetts), the cradle of robots and machines that the company manufactures and uses to streamline its processes and facilitate the daily work of its workers.
The company has shown the operation of these creations within the framework of the event ‘Delivering the Future’an event where he has brought a group of journalists closer to the innovations he is working on both for internal use and for delivering his packages to clients.
To begin, the vice president of Amazon Robotics and Information Technology, Joseph Quinlivan, has insisted that the company has become synonymous with the speed and variety of products it offers, and has highlighted that in 2022 Amazon is celebrating ten years “of significant investment in advanced technology”.
This growth has been seen, for example, in the creation of more than 700 job categories and the generation of more than a million jobs in that time, as the head of Technology of Amazon Robotics, Tye Brady, later added in subsequent statements given to Europa Press.
During this time, its sales volume has also grown, to the point that its employees around the world collected, stored or packed approximately 5 billion packages (about 13 million daily), according to the records of the last year.
For this reason, the electronic commerce giant has opted for the integration of cutting-edge technology to streamline the processes of preparation and distribution of products, having as reference point in robotics and innovation two of its logistics centers located in the United States.
In this sense, Brady recalled that Newborough is not the only town that has a logistics center like this in the state of Massachusetts, but that there are two centers that Amazon has opened in this territory in recent years.
On the other hand, he stressed that they are “thousands of people who work in the creation of robotics equipment“, but that between the two aforementioned centers a total of approximately 400 employees are distributed.
The first of them is in North Reading, which has been operating since 2012, but where, until last year, they were only in charge of designing these robots. Now, it has four lines of work.
With the opening of BOS27, Its Newborough factory has combined the task of designing new machines with the manufacture of the different models that coexist in its fleet, for which it has six lines in total. In this way, between both centers it is able to register 330,000 newly created robots per yearwhich indicates that one robot is manufactured per hour.
Among the robots manufactured in both centers are Hercules, Proteus, Robin, Pegasus and from now on Sparrow, a mechanical arm that uses a camera that works with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to treat the company’s products.
Unlike other of its robots, which only move objects from one place to another, Sparrow recognizes, manipulates and classifies products of different types (from packages with hair bands to packed books or cables).
Created to prevent employees from spending time and energy on mechanized processes, this robot uses a vacuum technique to place the products that are in good condition in different cubicles so that employees can quickly collect the merchandise already organized. To classify them, it not only identifies the product in question, but also reads its corresponding barcodes.
Sparrow, on the other hand, has a system that recognizes items in order to treat them appropriately. For example, if he picks up a book, does it for the cover or the spinethus avoiding wrinkling the pages.
In addition, it is capable of knowing if the products it handles are broken or damaged (such as a dented box or a compost bag with some imperfection that allows the contents to spill) and discards them during operation.
PROTEUS, THE AUTONOMOUS ROBOT DESIGNED FOR HEAVY LOADS
Although Amazon has presented this Thursday what it considers its “great technological bet”, During the tour that he has offered through BOS27, he has once again shown the operation of other of the robots with which he operates in these centers.
One of those that has generated the greatest expectation has been Proteus, its first fully autonomous warehouse robot, which it unveiled last summer and which works with a scanning technique thanks to a complex system of sensors.
This device has been designed to be able to move freely around a warehouse without the need to be inside a cage or behind bars. Unlike Hercules, Robin or Sparrow, Proteus can function in the presence of workers, without hindering your work.
It is designed to move heavy load carts of up to 800 pounds (around 360 kilograms) and thus prevent employees from transporting them, speeding up this process in the supply chain and working as a healthy alternative to physical work.
In this way, this “modular robot”, as commented by the manager of the Amazon Robotics program Mikell Taylor, moves freely around the work area and, in the event that a worker crosses or cuts its path, it detects it to stop without annoy or harm you.
Taylor has insisted that Amazon “does not seek to replace” the staff with the development of this type of robots, but instead raises the Proteus as auxiliaries during the working day. “We think of them as animals on a farm, so that they complement the tasks of the employees.”
The global director of Amazon Robotics Manufacturing, Erica McClosky, has spoken along the same lines, assuring that the company prefers to continue working on this type of robotics, more functional, than opting for humanoid robots, as other brands have already done. Among them, Xiaomi or Tesla.
“We are focused on two areas: mobility and product handling. Our intention is not to reach a milestone with a technology that brings together the latest developments in this fieldbut to create useful robotics that is in line with the company’s guidelines, that helps employees and that also has value for customers”, he commented.
Likewise, McClosky has emphasized that the introduction of robotics in its factories should not be assumed as a substitution of people by machines (and, as a consequence, fewer job offers), but as a demonstration that “Amazon continues to show interest in the speed in the delivery of products, the safety of customers and workers, and the offer of jobs at the local level” for promote the circular economy in the cities where it deploys these centers.
