In its robot lab in Westborough, on the outskirts of Boston (northeast of the US), the e-commerce giant Amazon produces robots and develops processes to automate its distribution centers and shorten order delivery times, a goal for which it is betting on technology, enabling doubts arise about the future of human work in its warehouses.
“What we’re going to do in the next five years will dwarf what we’ve been doing for the past 10 years,” said Joe Quinlivan, vice president of Amazon Robotics at the BOS27 Innovation and Manufacturing Center.
The “Delivering the Future” project aims to transform the company founded 28 years ago by Jeff Bezos to sell books over the Internet into a distribution pioneer, with its own technology and “made in USA” – production.
The tech giant has already managed to get a robot to manipulate products with the same dexterity of the human hand.
This week, Amazon unveiled to more than a hundred journalists from different countries its latest creation: “Sparrow”, a robot in the shape of a bird’s head that can detect, select and manage “millions of products”.
Equipped with cameras, it picks up products passing by on a moving conveyor belt and divides them into baskets for packaging.
“Given the variety of materials we have in our warehouses, Sparrow is a significant achievement,” says Tye Brady, the company’s chief robotics officer.
“Sparrow” joins other robots such as “Robin” and “Cardinal” (all names of birds), but this new device is even capable of manipulating products in packaging.
About 75% of Amazon’s five billion orders a year are handled by some sort of robot, according to Quinlivan.
Threat to work or addition?
“It’s not about machines replacing people. It’s about people and machines working together, working together to get a job done,” Brady assures.
Accused of practicing a form of “modern slavery” by some workers, the company with the second-largest workforce in the United States after distribution giant Walmart has already managed to prevent unionization at its facilities , with the exception of a warehouse in New York.
The University of Berkeley’s Center for Work Research and Education warns that while some technologies can lighten the toughest tasks in warehouses, they can also help “increase workload and work pace, with new methods of monitoring workers.”
And he specifically cites Amazon and its MissionRacer program, “a video game that pits employees against each other to prepare customer orders faster.”
While technology will not mean massive job losses in distribution centers in the short and medium term, youth, men, Latinos and blacks will suffer the most in the long term due to the growing demand for e-commerce.
“These workers will be disproportionately affected by technological change,” as they are currently “over-represented” in this industry, particularly in the United States, the university center warns.
Latinos represent 35% of the workforce in warehouse centers.
Proprietary technology and drones
Amazon controls the entire technology chain: it develops computer programs, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robot manipulation, simulation, prototype design and even a simultaneous translator for more than 100 languages.
It also decided to manufacture its robots in Westborough and North Reading, with the capacity to produce 1,000 units per day.
The company’s obsession is to reduce the moment when the consumer buys the product and the moment when he receives it to the smallest possible interval. Therefore, the so-called “last mile” of the distribution process is crucial for the business model. The company has 275,000 distributors to cover 148,000 daily routes, which can increase during peak periods.
By the end of this year, it will begin delivering drone packages in less than an hour from orders placed at two locations in California and Texas.
Source: DN
