Amazon Robots Struggling to Keep Up With Human Workers

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Mike Mulligan

Autonomous robots are filling up Amazon warehouses, where they're sorting, loading, and unloading packages with impressive efficiency. But it sounds like they're still outmatched by humans when it comes to many essential tasks.

The e-commerce giant's robotic arm Sparrow, for example, excels at what's called "top-picking," or picking up an item at the top of a storage container. It can even manipulate over 200 million items of varying sizes and weights, Amazon claims.

But it struggles at "targeted picking," which involves having to search through a container to pluck out an item hidden by other stuff. It's a common task that any able human employee could do. For robots to do the same, however, will require nothing short of a breakthrough in the field.

"That's a really hard job," Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, told The New York Times.

"I'm not saying it's impossible," he added, but that level of functionality would be "kind of the next frontier."

Stretched Win

Even with their incipient capabilities, Amazon warehouses are already heavily relying on on robots, especially if their sheer quantity is any indication. The company has over 750,000 of the machines in use overall, per the NYT, or about half of its 1.55 million human workers.

In many cases, the robots do excel. A mobile robotic arm mounted on top of a wheeled platform called Stretch, created by Boston Dynamics, deftly unloads packages from the back of a truck and places them on a conveyor belt.

According to Sally Miller, global chief information officer at the shipping giant DHL, Stretch can unload around twice as many boxes per hour as humans, who might earn something like $17 an hour for the job. She did not say how much the robot cost, but gloated about its advantages over pesky human workers.

"It doesn't call in sick, and it can work for several hours," Miller told the NYT. "It's a great solution."

Meanwhile, Brady claimed that one of Amazon's new warehouses uses an automated inventory management system called Sequoia, boosting the speed of package processing by 25 percent compared to older ones, while being 25 percent cheaper.

Machine Churning

The encroachment of the machines is a grim prospect for human warehouse workers, who may fear for their jobs. Fulfillment centers have high rates of employee turnover — jargon for people either getting fired or quitting the job a lot — because it's often grueling work for menial wages. Because companies like Amazon will do anything to avoid paying their employees more, automation is seen as a way to make up for the shortfall.

Nonetheless, robot advocates say that automation will actually be good for workers.

"Menial, mundane, repetitive tasks will be replaced by automation," Brady told the NYT. "That may freak people out, but it's going to allow people to focus more on what matters."

Another argument is that the deployment of robots will necessitate new jobs to oversee the technology, but a manager at one of Amazon's fulfillment centers told the NYT there were only around 100 such jobs out of the 2,500 who worked there.

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