Amazon has just announced a fully autonomous and mobile warehouse robot.
Their goal is to move large carts through the aisles of their warehouses, thus preventing humans from having to carry such a heavy and monotonous load.
His name is Proteus, programmed to work together with humans, it is not necessary to have them separated, since when a person is detected in its radius of action, the robot stops moving and only continues when the human moves away.
In addition to Proteus, which you can see in the video above, Cardinal has also been announced, it is a robotic arm designed to lift and move packages of up to 22 kg, although we will only see it working in 2023. Cardinal will be able to select individual packages , even if they are stacked and mixed.
In the article they have published describing their progress, they comment on what they are doing so that humans do not have to manually scan barcodes, since they will have a camera system that recognizes the packages without stopping to scan the label.
The goal, according to Amazon, is not to build robots instead of hiring people, but to offer more security in an environment where there are many human workers. All of its new robots were designed to help improve safety, since people don’t have to repetitively lift or move heavy packages, something that causes many injuries at large companies like Amazon.
It is clear that a balance could be found, since people who used to lift weights and move cars could now take a course to provide basic robot maintenance (cleaning parts, route programming, etc). In the same way that those who took care of horses before the invention of the car had to move to other sectors, the heavy work of warehouses is in danger of extinction.
