Amazon says its ‘humanoid’ robots will lift working conditions, not replace staff

The e-commerce titan has launched a suite of new AI and robotics in its warehouses ahead of the Christmas peak delivery period.

Amazon is trialling a bipedal named Digit as part of its collaboration with Agility Robotics – but the company says its not rushing into humoid robotics just yet.

Amazon has launched new artificial intelligence and robotics capabilities at its warehouses, saying the technology will speed up fulfilment and parcels deliveries, while increasing safety.

The $US1.33 trillion ($2 trillion) e-commerce giant unveiled a new robotics system called Sequoia – named after the giant Californian redwood trees – at its Delivering the Future Event at Seattle.

The system allows Amazon to place items for sale more quickly, reducing the time it takes to fulfil orders by up to 25 per cent, and it identifies inventory up 75 per cent faster. The company says it also improves shipping predictability and increases the number of same-day or next-day deliveries ahead of the busy Christmas peak period.

It is not yet clear how the new system will affect headcount or be introduced to Australia. But Amazon Australia general manager of robotic operations Siddharth Yadwad said the technology was designed to complement the workforce and also offer career progression to more highly skilled jobs.

Mr Yadwad said Amazon Australia had about 2500 robots in operation – about one for every local employee.

“So it’s very much a human centric operation that’s augmented by technology,” he said.

“We are not taking the human element out by any means. We’ve created a whole host of new categories of jobs globally to sort of deal with our technology; there is something like 700 new categories of work.

“We’ve trained people from the ground up to do that work. For example, we have quite a large engineering team here on site now that maintains and keeps our automation working the way it should.”

Sequoia is currently operating at one of Amazon’s fulfilment centres in Houston, Texas. The system works by having mobile robots transport containerised inventory directly to a gantry – a tall frame with a platform supporting equipment that can either restock totes or send them to an employee to pick out inventory which customers have ordered.

Amazon's new robots transport products inside tote containers to a new sorting machine, which removes some of the most arduous work in its warehouses.

Mr Yadwad said like Amazon’s other robotic systems, it further eliminates the “most demanding elements of typical warehousing work”, including lifting and moving items around.

Indeed, at Amazon’s robotic sites, machines bring goods directly to workers to pack and send rather than staff having to navigate shelves to find an item.

“The robots actually bring the goods to the people. So what I can say is that the most arduous elements of the work have been eliminated, which is fantastic. And not only is that safer, it creates a better working environment all around for our team,” Mr Yadwad said.

Amazon has spent more than $US1bn on safety from 2019 to 2022. Recordable injuries are 15 per cent lower at its warehouses featuring robotics, while lost time has been cut by 18 per cent, underscoring the productivity benefits.

Amazon's robots in action at its Sydney fulfilment centre.

The company has faced increasing competition in its home US market where it has reconfigured its operations to become more regionally focused, stocking and fulfilling more products closer to its customers.

Elon Musk showed off a new humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus, last year and said it would have “the potential to be more significant than the ­vehicle business over time”.

While Amazon is testing a bipedal robot dubbed “Digit” as part of its partnership with Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics vice president Scott Dresser said the company wasn’t rushing into building human-like machines.

“It goes back to manipulation and mobility. If you think about what we do in operations, you need to do both of those things very well,” Mr Dresser said.

“Today, we have robots to do one or the other. We don’t have a lot of robots that combine that. Agility has one potential path there which is a humanoid robot, and a lot of companies are looking at humanoid robots – it’s a logical way to think of the program because people move and manipulate.

“We want to see how it plays out. It is an experiment at the end of the day. Do employees know how to interact with it?

“Do we know how to build processes around it? Is it fast enough? I mean, there’s a bunch of things we have to get reliable enough, have all the right things in place to make sure that this is a technology that we want to scale bigger going forward.”

The author travelled to Seattle as a guest of Amazon