Amazon Ramps Up Automation Drive, Deploys ‘Humanoid Robots’ In US Stores
As part of it’s drive to automate it’s operations the online technology retail giant Amazon has deployed ‘Humanoid Robots’ in it’s warehouses in the United States to free up ‘Staff’ BBC reports.
According to the report, Amazon was It said testing ‘Digit’, a new robot with arms and legs which can move, grasp and handle items like a human.
The report stated that, rather than using wheels to move, Digit walks on two legs.
It also has arms that can pick up and move packages, containers, customer orders and objects.
Amazon said the move was to “freeing employees up to better deliver to its customers.
BBC quoted a union saying, Amazon had been treating their workers like robots for years.
An organiser at UK trade union GMB, Stuart Richards told BBC, “Amazon’s automation is [a] head-first race to job losses. We’ve already seen hundreds of jobs disappear to it in fulfilment centres”.
Amazon however said its robotics systems had in fact helped create “hundred of thousands of new jobs” within its operations.
The Firm said, “This includes 700 categories of new job types, in skilled roles, which didn’t exist within the company beforehand”.
It added that,it now has more than 750,000 robots working “collaboratively” with its human staff, often being used to take on “highly repetitive tasks”.
Amazon Robotics’ chief technologist, Tye Brady, was quoted saying at a media briefing in Seattle that people were “irreplaceable”,
He also disputed the suggestion that the company could have fully-automated warehouses in the future.
He said, “There’s not any part of me that thinks that would ever be a reality,” he said.
“People are so central to the fulfilment process; the ability to think at a higher level, the ability to diagnose problems.”
While peaking to the BBC, Scott Dresser of Amazon Robotics said, Digit has unique features that allowed it to deal with steps and stairs or places in Amazon’s facilities where there is need to move up and down.
He however said the robot was a prototype and the trial was about seeing whether it could work safely with human employees.
He said, “It’s an experiment that we’re running to learn a little bit more about how we can use mobile robots and manipulators in our environment here at Amazon.
Amazon also uses a wheeled robot to distribute goods around sites.
Mr Dresser suggested that the fears over human jobs being replaced didn’t match what had happened at Amazon.
He further stated, “Our experience has been these new technologies actually create jobs, they allow us to grow and expand. And we’ve seen multiple examples of this through the robots that we have today.
“They don’t always run unfortunately and we need people to repair them”.
Amazon has speed up its use of robots in recent years, as a result of pressure to cut costs.
Last year it announced it was trialling a giant robotic arm that can pick up items. It already uses wheeled robots to move goods around its warehouses, and it has started using drones for delivery in two US states. BBC reports.
