Amazon’s New Robot Can Handle Most Items in the Everything Store

Amazon built an ecommerce empire by automating much of the work needed to move goods and pack orders in its warehouses. There is still plenty of work for humans in those vast facilities because some tasks are too complex for robots to do reliably—but a new robot called Sparrow could shift the balance that Amazon strikes between people and machines. Brady declined to say how quickly Sparrow can pick items, saying that the robot is “learning all the time.” Automating more work inside warehouses naturally leads to thoughts of the specter of robots displacing humans. “It’s humans and machines working together—not humans versus machines—and if I can allow people to focus on higher level tasks, that’s the win.” Robots have become notably more capable in recent years, although it can be difficult to distinguish hype from reality. Many of those new machines are either mobile robots that wheel around factories and warehouses carrying goods or examples of the relatively new concept of “collaborative” robots that are designed to be safe to work alongside humans.