Amazon’s ‘loveable’ robots are not just a pretty face

Inside a vast Amazon warehouse in Nashville, Tennessee, robots with eyes and mouths work alongside human employees.
Proteus, Amazon’s first “collaborative robot”, created two years ago, has been updated following feedback from human co-workers who wanted it to be more “friendly”, Mikell Taylor, principal technical product manager at Amazon Robotics, said.
As the robot glides across the shop floor carrying crates filled with packages, its black pupils transform into arrows to give an indication of any plans to change direction. A flashing green light mimicking a mouth turns red if a human walks in front of it and it emits three “yelp” sounds.
“We wanted to make Proteus loveable and the feature face, the eyes that we put on it, the noises that it makes … was all purposefully designed to make it loveable,” Julie Mitchell, director of Amazon Robotics, said. “Then, as we field-tested it, and we got different pieces of feedback on that, we continued to innovate on it.” The robot is, she said, “just so darn cute”.
Proteus is only the start of Amazon’s plans to make robotics more collaborative with humans as it introduces increased automation across its logistics network.
“We don’t want to block off space that says, this is for the robots only,” Mitchell said. Proteus roams freely around the shopfloor, using sensors to detect and avoid objects in its way; other robots developed by Amazon are caged away to avoid safety risks.
Proteus carries around carts weighing up to 880lb and works with Cardinal, a robotic arm that sorts packages by zip code and loads them into carts. Proteus then moves the carts from the outbound dock area of the warehouse to the loading dock, where deliveries are loaded on to lorries.
Proteus’s safety system can be used as “a building block” to think about “all the other applications for robotics to make it more collaborative”, Mitchell said.
No safety incidents have been recorded in Proteus’s two-year career, she added.
Amazon has become the world’s largest manufacturer of industrial logistics as it invests in robots to expand its global e-commerce empire. The company has deployed 750,000 robots across its operations network, half the number of full and part-time Amazon employees around the world. Amazon does not share its technology with other companies.
This week the company unveiled its model for the next generation of advanced warehouses. At a huge fulfilment centre in Louisiana, equivalent to the size of 55 football fields, there are ten times more robotics than at its existing advanced warehouses such as Nashville. The site uses eight different robotics systems to increase the pace and volume of packages it processes for delivery.
At the centre of the facility is Sequoia, an inventory system that can hold more than 30 million items. It co-ordinates thousands of mobile robots and a host of robotic arms to bring items to employees at workstations.
As inventory and packages move through the facility, three artificial intelligence-powered robotic arms — Robin, Cardinal and Sparrow — sort customer orders before passing them on to Proteus for outbound delivery. Amazon’s latest version of Sparrow can observe an item and adjust its “grip” to handle more than 200 million products.
Amazon says its new warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, which opened in May, has already had a 25 per cent reduction in its “cost to serve”, or the price of getting a product from Amazon to a customer. The more packages Amazon can get through a building using robots running 24-7, with no breaks, the more the retailer can lower its costs and increase the speed of sales to customers.
Mitchell called it the Amazon “flywheel”, whereby the robotics create a “positive loop” by improving delivery speeds and increasing the number and type of products that can be delivered, which means Amazon will quickly see a return on its investment in the technology.
She said she sees Amazon achieving even further reduction in delivery costs, by as much as 50 per cent or 75 per cent. “Our goals are always growing,” she said.
The investment in robotics has meant there are fewer human workers per sq ft in warehouses, she admits. Amazon insists, however, that robots do not mean the end of human warehouse workers. At Shreveport there will be as many as 2,500 workers, close to the roughly 3,000 people who work at the Nashville fulfilment centre, which is a similar size.
“Automating doesn’t actually mean that there’s very little humans,” Mitchell said. “There’s always things that are going to go wrong. This is the real world. There’s hiccups that happen, there’s exceptions that happen. There’s even things that you might not think of, like spills that occur or a product that comes out of its packaging. So we always need the support of our employees to keep the systems healthy and running.”
Employees that previously did heavy lifting, packing and moving in the warehouse have been redirected to jobs that assist the robots with manual labour.
It can take as little as five minutes to train someone who has just graduated from high school to fix a robot but some roles are more technical, such as replacing individual components underneath the hood of the robot, which requires more extensive training.
Amazon may have more work to do convincing existing and future employees to welcome robots. A survey by MIT researchers this year of more than 9,000 workers in nine countries found that American workers were most pessimistic about the impact of automation on pay, autonomy and job security.
In countries with strong social safety nets, such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain, the perceived impact of automation on wages and job security was most positive. In the more liberal market economies of Australia, the UK and the US, however, the perceived impact of automation on job security and pay was neutral or negative. The survey was conducted by Ipsos and sponsored by Amazon.
Ben Armstrong, executive director and a research scientist at MIT, where he co-leads the “work of the future” initiative, said he thinks the strategy of employers should not be to minimise anxiety about automation. “I think the main goal is to calibrate trust so you shouldn’t not trust automation and technology at all, or else you’re not going to use it effectively. But you also shouldn’t over-trust it. You shouldn’t be sure that automation is going to give you the right result you need to. It’s more like the human-machine partnership, where you still need to be using your skills, vigilance, etcetera.”
Will automation help to upskill the workforce? Armstrong said: “One of the things that we’ve seen over the last 40 years in the US, that also applies to the UK, is this bifurcation of work where there’s actually more jobs for lower-skilled workers — although the wages have been flat in some cases — and more jobs for higher-skilled workers, but a hollowing out of the middle. So the worry, I think, from some economists, is that there’s going to be this push of people who used to have middle-skill jobs into this lower-skill pathway.”
At Shreveport, the proportion of skilled jobs is 30 per cent higher than at other warehouses, which allows Amazon to create career paths and boost retention, according to the retailer.
So, how sure can Amazon really be that its robots will not go rogue in the style of a bad sci-fi movie? “They are task-based robots, so they are not capable of going rogue,” Mitchell said. “They are executing a plan that was deployed from our planning systems, so we are very safe.”