Amazon touts Vulcan, its first robot with a sense of 'touch'
- Amazon unveiled Vulcan, a robot with a sense of touch, on Wednesday in Germany to assist workers in its warehouses worldwide.
- The robot's development began three years ago to address challenges of dexterity and safety in handling items stored in crowded and high shelves.
- Vulcan uses an AI-powered sensor to determine pressure and torque, enabling it to pick and stow about 75% of the one million items at the Spokane facility.
- Amazon states Vulcan will reduce injury risks by replacing ladder use, work alongside humans without replacing them, and create new higher-skilled jobs in robot maintenance.
- The robot's deployment signals increased automation in warehouses, potentially improving efficiency and costs while Amazon continues investing $1.2 billion in upskilling workers since 2019.
93 Articles
93 Articles
Amazon's new robot has a sense of touch, but it's not here to replace humans
Amazon has just unveiled its newest warehouse robot called Vulcan, which has a "sense of touch." Designed to gently stow items using pressure-sensitive gripping and artificial intelligence (AI), Vulcan is now being tested in two Amazon facilities, in Spokane, Washington state, US, and Hamburg, Germany.


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Amazon offers peek at new human jobs in an AI bot world
The tech industry seems to have two thoughts when it comes to where human workers fit into the AI-powered world they are creating: Either they think that all the jobs, except perhaps their own, will be done by bots. (VC Marc Andreessen seems to think that his work as an investor could never be automated). Or they think that bots will do the icky, boring work, acting as human companions in jobs while humans do brand-new jobs that the bot revolut…
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