Christmas is one of the most important times of the year for Amazon and the e-commerce company has announced the renewal of its warehouse operations with new sorting machines and bipedal robots equipped with artificial intelligence to speed up shipments for these dates and onwards.
Tye Brady, chief technology officer at Amazon Robotics, revealed his new robotic system called Sequoia, named after the giant trees native to California’s Sierra Nevada region, a machine that is already operating at a logistics center in Houston, Texas, and is designed to both achieve greater speed in the shipping chain and reduce worker injuries.
Sequoia integrates multiple robotic systems to store Amazon inventory in containers, bringing together mobile robots, robotic arms, and a new ergonomic employee workstation. At this workstation, workers receive inventory at hip height, saving them from having to grab orders in high places or bend down.
Amazon highlights that “Sequoia allows us to identify and store the inventory we receive in our distribution centers by up to 75% and reduce the time it takes to process an order through a distribution center by up to 25%.”
For years, labor activists and union members have raised concerns that Amazon’s desire to increase its speed in the shipping chain could put its workers at risk. And some have even warned that the introduction of robotics may also increase employee injuries.
Asked on a panel whether robotics and AI will negatively impact human work in the enterprise, Brady said that in his experience, the more robots, the more jobs.
“Let’s just look at the data. In 2012, Amazon made a major investment in robotics. Since then, hundreds of thousands of new jobs and more than 700 new types of jobs have been created. Surely jobs will change (as the technology) but that doesn’t mean they are lost,” Brady said.
But the automation of logistics processes will not be the only great novelty that Amazon will present for the Christmas campaign. It will also debut advances in the distribution of merchandise.
Amazon’s revolutionary package delivery using aerial drones will arrive in Europe at the end of next year, as announced by the e-commerce company, highlighting that the first two countries on the continent in which this shipping system will be used will be the United Kingdom and Italy.
One of the great novelties, in addition to the way in which shipments will arrive, is that medicines can also be ordered at home with these drones. The system has already been operating in the United States for a year with questionable performance.
The drone, according to Amazon, will not need to land at the home of the customer who has ordered the product, it will only launch the package at a safe distance of about three meters. A careful packaging system will cushion the fall and prevent products from arriving damaged.
