Amazon develops a robot that ‘feels’ touch, just like its human workers

Amazon has announced a new AI-infused warehouse robot that it says has a sense of touch. This allows the Vulcan robot to pick and stow roughly three-quarters of the items stocked in the company’s warehouses, a task that was previously handled predominantly by human workers. “Vulcan represents a fundamental leap forward in robotics,” says Aaron Parness, Amazon’s director of applied science, in a press release. “It’s not just seeing the world, it’s feeling it, enabling capabilities that were impossible for Amazon robots until now.” Vulcan is not Amazon’s first robot capable of picking items up, but it is the first that’s dextrous and sensitive enough to maneuver goods inside the compact, fabric-covered compartments that the company uses for storage — which are themselves already moved around warehouses by a different fleet of robots. Vulcan uses an arm that Amazon says “resembles a ruler stuck onto a hair straightener” to rearrange any items already in a compartment and add new ones, w ... Read full article.