Nov 20(ABC): At Amazon’s robotics laboratory on the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts, the company’s newest automaton “Sparrow” picks out items to be shipped to customers, displaying human hand-like dexterity.
It is the e-commerce giant’s most advanced robot yet and could soon do the job of the hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees who sort and send five billion packages annually.
The development of “Sparrow,” and other robots like “Robin” and “Cardinal,” are fueling fears that Amazon’s warehouses will one day be run by machines, leading to huge layoffs.
Amazon’s robotics chief Tye Brady plays down such concerns, which have been expressed by labor unions.
“It’s not machines replacing people,” he tells journalists during a tour of the laboratory, which opened in Westborough in October last year.
“It’s actually machines and people working together in order to collaborate to do a job.”
Equipped with cameras and cylindrical tubes, Sparrow can successfully detect and select an individual item from millions of products of different shapes and sizes.