robots that grip

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Ever try picking up a coin from the ground?

You use your hearing to track where it bounced, your vision to spot it, and your sense of touch to know exactly when to grab it. What's easy for humans has been nearly impossible for robots - until now.

Amazon just unveiled Vulcan, their first robot with a sense of touch, at a fulfillment center in Dortmund, Germany.

While typical warehouse robots are "numb and dumb" (as Amazon director Aaron Parness puts it), Vulcan can actually feel objects and adjust its grip in real time.

"In the past, when industrial robots have unexpected contact, they either emergency stop or smash through that contact," Parness explained. "They often don't even know they've hit something because they cannot sense it."

Vulcan solves a specific problem: Amazon stores inventory in fabric-covered pods with tiny compartments - each about a foot square and holding up to 10 items on average. For robots, fitting items into these crowded spaces or plucking them out has been a nightmare.

This new robot has force feedback sensors that tell it how hard it's pushing and how firmly it's holding something.

Its "end of arm tooling" looks like a ruler stuck onto a hair straightener - the ruler pushes items around to make room, while the paddles hold new items and use built-in conveyor belts to slide them into place.

For picking items, Vulcan uses an arm with a camera and suction cup. The camera identifies what to grab and watches to make sure it took only the right thing - avoiding what engineers call "co-extracting non-target items" (aka accidentally grabbing two things at once).

Vulcan can handle about 75% of all items Amazon stores at speeds comparable to human workers. When it encounters something tricky, it knows to ask a human partner for help.

The robot is already deployed at fulfillment centers in Spokane, Washington, and Hamburg, Germany, focusing on the top and bottom rows of storage pods. These areas typically require workers to use stepladders or bend down - tasks that are tiring and less ergonomic than working at chest height.

Vulcan learns like a child would - through trial and error, building an understanding of how different objects behave when touched.

The team trained its AI on thousands of real-world examples, from picking up socks to moving fragile electronics.

Amazon plans to roll out Vulcan across Europe and the U.S. over the next couple of years. Parness calls it "a technology that three years ago seemed impossible but is now set to help transform our operations."

Vulcan represents a huge leap in robotics - machines that can actually feel what they're doing. But as robots get more human-like abilities, what does this mean for the future of work?

Do you think giving robots a sense of touch will create better human-robot collaboration, or are we heading toward a future where machines can do everything humans can? Share your thoughts!

Monica said she liked the crossword, so here’s a new one!

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