Amazon's new robot should strike fear into its hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers

lvaranasi@insider.com (Lakshmi Varanasi) - Yesterday 

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Amazon unveiled Sparrow, a robot capable of handling individual items on Thursday.

The robot could reduce the company's reliance on human warehouse workers.

Amazon has been trying to fully automate its warehouses for the past several years.

What do you call a robotic arm that relies on computer vision, artificial intelligence, and suction cups to pick up items?

In Amazon's world, it's called a "Sparrow."

The tech giant unveiled a robot on Thursday that's capable of identifying individual items that vary in shape, size, and texture. Sparrow can also pick these up via the suction cups attached to its surface and place them into separate plastic crates.

Sparrow is the first robot Amazon has revealed of its kind and it has the potential to wipe out significant numbers of the company's warehouse workers.

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The arm can identify approximately 65% of Amazon's inventory, the company told CNBC. Until now, this sort of sophisticated identification has been reserved for the company's human employees.




"Working with our employees, Sparrow will take on repetitive tasks, enabling our employees to focus their time and energy on other things, while also advancing safety," the company said in a post announcing Sparrow on its site. "At the same time, Sparrow will help us drive efficiency by automating a critical part of our fulfillment process so we can continue to deliver for customers."

It's not entirely clear how quickly Sparrow will be integrated into Amazon's warehouses. Many of the company's products are stored on mesh shelves, according to Bloomberg, which are incompatible for robotic arms like Sparrow.

However, Amazon has long been aiming to fully automate its warehouses, Bloomberg reported. The company also said in its quarterly earnings call back in April that it had hired too many warehouse workers during the pandemic.

In its post announcing Sparrow, the company said that it already relies on other avian-named robots to redirect packages to various locations in its warehouses.

In June, Amazon unveiled its first autonomous robot called Proteus, which can lift and move package carrying carts.

Right now, about 75% of 5 billion packages the company processes annually are handled by robots in at least one part of the delivery process, the company told CNBC on Thursday.

A spokesperson for Amazon told Insider, "Sparrow is the first robotic system in our warehouses that can detect, select, and handle individual products in our inventory. In our current research and development efforts, we are working with Sparrow to consolidate inventory before it is packaged for customers but the possible applications of this technology in our operations is much broader."