Amazon made a robot with a feeling of touch

Amazon New warehouse developed Robot This touch is used to wander the shelves to find the right product for shipping to customers.

The robot, which is called Volcan, is a meaningful step towards making robots less sausage fingers compared to humans. The capabilities of robotics may allow them by more business and manufacturing in the coming years.

Aaron Barnes, the Amazon Robotics AI, explains that the development of Volcan, the touch sensing helps the robot to push the elements around the shelf and determine what it follows. “When you try to store items (or choose) in one of these centuries, you cannot really do this task without contacting other elements,” he says.

The Volcan system consists of a traditional automatic arm with a dedicated supplement that resembles a spoon for the dumplings in the shelf, and a bullet to seize the elements to pull them.

Vulcan has sensors on many of its joints that allow the robot to detect the edge and features of the elements. Barnes says that Automated learning It is the key to understanding the sensor signals and also forms part of the algorithm that controls how the robot takes. “The special sauce that we have is the interpretation of software for the torque of power, and how we wrap it into our control loop and in our movement plans,” he says.

Amazon revealed Volcan at the Al -Wafa Center in Hamburg, Germany today. The company says that the robot is already working in this facility and another in Spokan, Washington.

The new robots will work on the same line of human beings, and will aim to spare them from the back of the back by accommodating more elements of high or low shelves. The elements decided by the robot that cannot be found will be reset for human workers.

“Amazon stores many different products in boxes, so it is necessary to withdraw a specific object to fill the demand,” says Ken Goldberg, the automatic world at the University of California, Berkeley. “Until now this was very difficult, so I am curious about seeing the new system.”

Goldberg says research on automated touch sensing has advanced in recent years, as many groups have been sensing joints and surface. But he added that the robots have a way to go before they can match the capacity of touch to workers in the body and blood. “The human feeling of touch is very sensitive and very complicated, with a huge dynamic range,” says Goldberg. “Robots are advancing quickly, but I will be surprised by seeing human skin sensors in the five years to the next ten years.”

Labor colleagues robot

However, Volcan should help automate more human beings currently doing in the vast Amazon Empire for Al -Wafa Centers. The company has Lift In recent years with robots full of artificial intelligence capable of seizing and transporting packages and packed boxes. Storage and recovery of elements of shelves is one of the most challenging functions for robots that must be done, and it relies heavily on human work.

Barnes says he does not expect robots that take over all the works completed within the centers of loyalty to Amazon. “We really don’t believe in automating 100 percent or extinguishing lights,” he says. “We can reach 75 percent and have robots that work along with our employees, and the amount will be larger (either work alone).”