Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans

At an event in Dortmund, Germanytoday, Amazon announced a new robotic system called Vulcan, which the company is calling “its first robotic system with a genuine sense of touch—designed to transform how robots interact with the physical world.” In the short to medium term, the physical world that Amazon is most concerned with is its warehouses, and Vulcan is designed to assist (or take over, depending on your perspective) with stowing and picking items in its mobile robotic inventory system. Related: Amazon’s Vulcan Robots Are Mastering Picking Packages In two upcoming papers in IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Amazon researchers describe how both the stowing and picking side of the system operates. We covered stowing in detail a couple of years ago, when we spoke with Aaron Parness, the director of applied science at Amazon Robotics. Parness and his team have made a lot of progress on stowing since then, improving speed and reliability over more than 500,000 stows in operational wareh ... Read full article.