Amazon.com has just come a lot closer to achieving this elusive goal, with a leap in its automation prowess that promises far-reaching effects for its huge workforce and its future growth ambitions.
The tech giant last month unveiled a collection of new robots, one of which is suited to replacing humans in the most common job at Amazon – picking up items and placing them elsewhere. The linchpin of this new kind of automation is a robot arm – appropriately named Sparrow after the tenacious, pervasive bird – that combines advanced artificial intelligence, a variety of grippers, and the speed and precision that is now standard in off-the-shelf industrial robotic arms.
The announcement was easy to miss, coming as it did amid a run of news that, in part, illustrated some of the challenges Amazon is trying to tackle with its automation effort. The company began layoffs of corporate employees in mid-November, part of a sweeping cost-cutting effort to deal with the aftereffects of its rapid expansion during the pandemic.
The company’s workforce more than doubled during that period, to exceed 1.6 million as of early this year. The vast majority of those employees were added in Amazon’s sprawling logistics operation, which delivers packages to e-commerce customers. Amazon has been struggling to manage the size and morale of that group of employees, some of whom have grown restless over the demands of their highly repetitive jobs. The company in October beat back an attempt to unionize a facility in New York state by a nascent labor group that vowed to continue its campaign.
One of Amazon’s long-term solutions to these issues is robots that could make the roles that many of these workers now occupy obsolete, although that’s not the way the company talks about its automation efforts. Instead, Amazon couches its automation in terms of benefits to its workers.
Amazon’s recently unveiled robots could help the company lower both injury rates and turnover in its warehouses, says Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Global Robotics. “Robots are good at repetitive tasks and heavy lifting – I want to automate out mundane and repetitive tasks,” he says.
The Sparrow is singular in its capabilities, and the scale of Amazon’s ambitions for it. On its face, the robot has the potential to someday save Amazon billions of dollars in wages and benefits. Or, as leaders at Amazon like to put it, it will allow the company to continue to grow, despite its recent labor challenges. “Our goal is to augment our people with the tools they need to do their jobs more efficiently and safely,” says Mr. Brady. “It’s my belief that collaborative robotics is really an unlock to more productivity, and it can also better the employee experience,” he adds.
Amazon, along with a collection of other robotics companies developing similar machines, are chasing what experts in the field call the “holy grail” of robotics — machines as dexterous, quick and adaptable as a human arm and hand.
Such a robot could someday be capable of handling any of the thousands – or in Amazon’s case, millions – of different goods carried in a typical e-commerce fulfillment warehouse.
Amazon’s robotic arm is still at an experimental stage. For the company to continue working on it, it must prove its worth, as even Amazon’s robotics division has not escaped broader cost-cutting. A company spokesperson told the Journal Amazon would lay off 2% of workers in this division, part of a process of deciding which robotics research projects to trim and which to double down on.
Sparrow’s first task will be as part of an experimental, automated goods-handling system that the company…