Amazon’s latest robot likely handled your package

Amazon has debuted its latest robot, Vulcan, which is helping Amazon warehouse workers with its newfound sense of touch.

Amazon’s director of applied sciences, Aaron Parness, describes the average robot as “numb and dumb.” Meaning, robots struggle to tackle jobs that require human senses.

“In the past, when industrial robots have unexpected contact, they either emergency stop or smash through that contact. They often don’t even know they have hit something because they cannot sense it,” Parness said.

But now, that’s all changed, as Amazon has developed Vulcan, the world’s first robot with a sense of touch.

Amazon debuted its Vulcan robot at the Delivering the Future event in Dortmund, Germany. The tech giant introduced its new robot, which is “neither numb nor dumb.”

Parness said that Vulcan demonstrates a “fundamental leap forward in robotics.” Not only does it see its surroundings, but it can also feel them, “enabling capabilities that were impossible for Amazon robots until now,” Parness continued.

Vulcan, which is already helping its colleagues in Amazon’s fulfillment centers, was commended by an Amazon employee, who said that workers can pick up items and stow them more efficiently.

How can Amazon’s Vulcan robot feel?

Amazon’s Vulcan robot uses “end of arm tooling,” which Amazon said resembles a ruler attached to a hair straightener.

This arm is equipped with sensors that indicate how hard the machine is pushing or how tightly the arm is grasping the object.

The ruler part then pushes items already on the shelves to make way for stowing.

The arms (the hair straightener part) or the paddles hold the item that needs to be put away.

The robot can adjust its grip based on the size and shape of the object using its sense of touch.

Utilizing a camera and a suction cup, Vulcan can also pick up items, not just put them away.

The camera looks at the shelves (or compartments) and selects the item to be grabbed. This added sense of vision allows the robot to find the best spot to safely hold the object.

The suction cup is then used to evenly distribute weight and grab the object, with the camera overlooking the process, making sure it's the right item.

According to Amazon, the robot can pick up and stow roughly 75% of items stored in its warehouses at a pace similar to that of its human counterparts.

“It also has the smarts to identify when it can’t move a specific item, and can ask a human partner to tag in, helping us leverage the best of what our technology and employees can achieve by working together,” Amazon claims.

Vulcan, which will perform roughly 75% of the handling tasks in Amazon’s warehouse, wasn’t created by happenstance. It took a lot of work to employ these bots, Amazon claims.

“Adding robot(s)...required years of work on all sorts of tech from force feedback sensors and a “hand” that can carefully handle millions of unique items, to a tool for nudging all kinds of boxes and baggies of all shapes and sizes, to a stereo vision system to estimate where there’s available space in the bin,” the company said.

Amazon plans to deploy Vulcan systems “over the next couple of years” at fulfillment centers in Europe and the United States.