The world leader in e-commerce has already deployed 520,000 robots in its warehouses and accelerates its conversion, despite the debates on employment and working conditions.
By Alexandre Piquard
A large yellow metal arm plunges into a plastic locker filled with objects and extracts a bottle of fruit juice. Thanks to seven small ends capable of sucking, he lifts it and then moves it to its right towards one of the four lockers placed in front of it. He deposits the object there. Then he starts the operation again with a packet of chat kibble … On the left, on a screen, we discover one of the secrets of this robot: thanks to several cameras and sensors, as well as to artificial intelligence software, he ” sees “the contents of the locker, identifies the outline and the nature of the objects.
“When he puts them, he even puts them in order to minimize the lost place”, enthuses Jason Messrger, technical manager of the Amazon robotic branch, who, Thursday, November 10, presented this new robot baptized Sparrow, in its Boston innovation center. “This robot succeeds in the tasks of an infinitely greater complexity than all its predecessors: it can already handle 65 % of the hundred millions of items offered for sale on Amazon”, insists Mr. Messrger.
The previous version, Robin, only knew how to enter the fifteen cardboard packaging used by the world leader in online sales. Deployed for eighteen months, 1,000 “Robin” already move parcels in Amazon warehouses. A more elaborate version, called Cardinal, will be deployed from the end of 2022. Sparrow, currently being tested in Texas, should arrive in warehouses in 2024. The pace of this robotization may seem slow. But he already exceeds the prophecies of Jeff Bezos: in 2019, the founder of Amazon predicted that the very difficult challenge to grasp objects with a robotic arm would be overcome “in ten years”.
“First manufacturer of industrial robots”
The disclosure of Sparrow Thursday was part of a demonstration of the greatness of Amazon’s ambitions in robotics. It was in Boston, in the northeast of the United States -and not at the Seattle headquarters, on the west coast -, that its Amazon Robotics subsidiary is installed. The robots are designed and produced on site, in the brand new center of Westborough, west of the city, and in another factory, in North Reading, to the north. The latter was the headquarters of Kiva, the manufacturer that Amazon bought in 2012 to start his foray into the field.
Amazon is already known to have deployed in its warehouses the flagship robot of its subsidiary: Hercules, a small square on a casters capable of passing under articles to move them to the warehouse. The company claims to have already 520,000 robots active in its sites, including those, in France, from Bretigny-sur-Orge (Essonne) and Metz. Of the 3 billion packages shipped by the platform each year, 75 % would have been managed with the help of one of these machines. The company also considers itself as “the first manufacturer of industrial robots”, capable of producing up to 300,000 copies per year.
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