Amazon has introduced a new robot called Vulcan, designed to enhance product picking in warehouses by using tactile sensors to navigate and locate items. This robot features a custom arm with a spatula-like appendage for maneuvering through storage bins while simultaneously identifying the shapes and contours of various products. By employing advanced machine learning, Vulcan is able to adapt its movements and grasp items from challenging positions, thus collaborating alongside human workers to minimize strenuous tasks and improve overall fulfillment efficiency in facilities located in Hamburg and Spokane.
"When you're trying to stow [or pick] items in one of these pods, you can't really do that task without making contact with the other items." - Aaron Parness, Amazon's director of robotics AI.
"The special sauce we have is the software interpretation of the force torque, and how we wrap those into our control loop and into our motion plans." - Aaron Parness.
"Amazon stores many different products in bins, so rummaging is necessary to pull out a specific object to fill an order." - Ken Goldberg, roboticist at UC Berkeley.
"Vulcan has sensors on several of its joints that allow the robot to detect the edge and contours of items." - Article Summary.
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