I spent a number of years working on software at Amazon in the Picking and storage space. This truly is the Holy Grail in the sense that I'm not actually sure what they want is possible/real.<p>There is a trade-off between storage density and ease of picking. This is true for humans as well as robots. An example: Open a drawer in your kitchen. If it's full as possible in an unorganized fashion, you'll often struggle to even locate the item you're looking for. And once you find it, you need to carefully move other items around to get it out.<p>Now, empty that drawer and put back 1/3 of the items, carefully organized. Now you can find and grab anything quickly! Even a robot could! ... But you need 3 times as many drawers in your kitchen.<p>Your messy kitchen drawer is a pretty close parallel to a typical Amazon storage bin.<p>Set aside the question of robot speed (they're slow), the real question is how much less storage density is needed for the robot to function. Giving up storage density means a smaller selection in each warehouse, which increases shipping costs- the item you want isn't as near to you anymore- or it demands a lot more warehouses, which are expensive to build and operate.<p>Shipping costs dominate their overall cost to get you what you ordered. Fully automating picking at the cost of reduced storage density is a net loss.
The raw video that was released of Sparrow<p><a href="https://youtu.be/lqxFvYgo5S8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/lqxFvYgo5S8</a><p>Interestingly they said the computer vision only matches 65% of Amazons product inventory (at the moment).<p>I wonder if they can still deploy it on certain lines where the order’s products 100% fall into the 65% bucket and route the rest to human lines. Or let the robots sort first before passing only unfinished ones to humans?<p>I’m also curious which products it can’t recognize. Probably a lot of small loose items.
Note that this is just Amazon demonstrating a prototype in their Innovation Center. I take it to be a mostly PR move showing “thought leadership.” Replicating the functionality of the human hand is notoriously hard, although it has been tried many times before by many companies, AFAIK there has been no great success.<p>The push for automation currently is not about replacing workers and cutting costs (although, of course, those are desirable): there’s <i>tremendous</i> churn in all warehouse roles so much so that most companies are hard pressed to find workers. Many new hires quit <i>during the two week training programs</i>.
Couldn’t care less. When they have a robot that will clean my house, do my dishes and laundry, mow my lawn and remove snow, call me. I would spend thousands for a robot like that.