Amazon has hundreds of thousands of robots in its warehouses, but that doesn’t mean all of its robotics initiatives are a success story.
The e-commerce giant has halted its robotic warehouse project Blue Jay just months after unveiling the technology, as initially reports Business Insider and confirmed by TechCrunch.
Blue Jay, a multi-armed robot designed to sort and move packages, was introduced in October for use in the company’s same-day delivery facilities. At the time, the company was testing the robots at a facility in South Carolina and said it took Amazon significantly less time for Blue Jay to develop —only about a year— than it took to develop its other warehouse robots, a speed the company credits to advances in artificial intelligence.
Amazon spokesperson Terrence Clark told TechCrunch that the Blue Jay was released as a prototype — though that wasn’t made clear in the company’s initial press release.
The company plans to use Blue Jay’s core technology for other robotics “manipulation programs” with employees who worked on Blue Jay moving to other projects.
“We’re always experimenting with new ways to improve the customer experience and make work safer, more efficient and more engaging for our employees,” Clark told TechCrunch via email. “In this case, we’re actually accelerating the use of the underlying technology that was developed for Blue Jay, and almost all of that technology is being carried over and will continue to support employees across our network.”
Amazon also introduced the Vulcan robot last year, which is used in the storage areas of the company’s warehouses. Vulcan is a two-armed robot, with one arm rearranging and moving items around a compartment, while the other is equipped with a camera and suction cups to grab the goods. Vulcan can reportedly “feel” the objects it touches and was trained on data gathered from real-world interactions.
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Amazon has been developing its in-house robotics program since 2012 when it bought Kiva Systems, a robotics company whose warehouse automation technology has been the foundation of Amazon’s fulfillment operations. It surpassed 1 million robots in its warehouses last July.
