Sparrow: Bird's-eye view of Amazon's future

BOSTON: Sindhu Reddy Alluri was a Class 12 student in Hyderabad when she first ordered an item from Amazon. At that time, a worker located her parcel - one of her favourite books, from the Harry Potter series - at a local warehouse, packed it nicely and gave it to an Amazon delivery partner. Now, Sindhu is 28 and works as an engineer at Amazon's 350,000sqft robotics facility in Westborough on the outskirts of Boston. She's part of a team that's proudly showing off Sparrow. This Sparrow's not a bird, it's not a plane. It's a robot that identifies stuff from entire containers - whether it's a book, shampoo or phone - picks it on its own and sorts it so it can be packed and shipped.

Sparrow was among Amazon's newest robots the e-commerce giant unveiled recently at its first global media event, 'Delivering the Future,' at BOS37, which is what the robotics facility in the state of Massachusetts is called. The other was Proteus, so lean and cylinder-shaped it moves seamlessly on the warehouse floor and carries weighty package-filled carts to the point where a worker simply has to pick the illumined chosen items from the carts for sorting.

On the nature of innovation under way, Joseph Quinlivan, vice-president of Amazon Robotics, said, "What we're doing in the next 5 years will dwarf what we've done in the last 10 years."

Already, two of Amazon's robots, Robin and Cardinal, have arms to handle packages. But Sparrow stands out in that it "picks" individual items, according to principal tech product manager Jason Messinger, "with vacuum cups at its end-of-arm tool", and it can do so "in millions", all by reading bar codes and figuring out sizes and shapes with its sensors, with "image memory" and a host of other techniques.

Other bots are equally busy. One is Hercules, blue and almost ubiquitous. It takes just minutes to get itself charged before it goes around "finding products and bringing them to members (staffers)".

But if Sparrow is "Amazon's first robotic system that can detect, select and handle" products, if Robin and Cardinal are redirecting packages, and if Proteus and Hercules are taking on massive workloads, where does that leave the issue of human employment? The idea, said Amazon spokespersons, is to avoid human beings doing the grinding work of walking all around warehouses a number of times in a day to fetch products. And Quinlivan said the push towards robotics and advanced technology has "created 700 new job categories" within the company.

Apart from the robots, Amazon showcased its new delivery drone. Called the MK30, it will make its first deliveries in Texas in 2024.

Similarly on display were Amazon's Rivian-built electric delivery vans. Some of these custom electric vehicles have rolled out in India as well, said Mai Le, Amazon's VP, last mile.

(The writer was in Boston at the invitation of Amazon)