Amazon’s building a sensitive robot. And by sensitive, I don’t mean C-3PO, the arthritic fussbot of Star Wars lore, whose core programming was not to harm humans physically but to harm them emotionally with intergalactic whining that stretched from one galaxy to the other.
No, I don’t mean Amazon’s new warehouse robot has a heart of gold or a tendency to complain. It has a sense of touch that Amazon says will let it pick up and manipulate your Amazon order with less chance of crushing the items to bits.
They call it the Vulcan. Yes, really. Take a guess at why.
function over form
If you were hoping for a vaguely humanoid robot with a torso and limbs, stifle your disappointment. It’s a disembodied arm that has limited movement, although it’s attached to a metal frame near its work station.
“Numb and dumb” is how Aaron Parness, Amazon director of applied science, described typical robots that work in commercial environments. “In the past, when industrial robots have unexpected contact, they either emergency stop or smash through that contact,” he says, according to Amazon’s press release announcing the Vulcan. “They often don’t even know they have hit something because they cannot sense it.”
Right now it’s able to pick about 75% of the items that one of Amazon’s human product pickers (hate that we have to specify “human” in employee descriptions now) and can perform the job at a similar speed, according to Amazon.
Oh, and I had to Google that Star Trek reference to the Vulcan nerve pinch, by the way. But if you got it right off the bat, good for you. I’m sure the Amazon engineers who named the Vulcan (or more likely, the marketers) made that reference purposefully.
Just imagine a near-future where your supervisor is a robot. You pester it one too many times for a bathroom break, and it sighs, reaches over, and pinches you in the neck, crumpling you to the floor and temporarily disabling you.
I’m not saying it’s definitely the future we’ve signed up for, but it’s pretty damn close.
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