Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans \ stacker news ~ideasfromtheedge

Amazon grows to over 750k robots, replacing 100k humans finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-grows-over-750-000-153000967.html

335 sats \ 5 comments \ @nym 21 Apr ideasfromtheedge

Amazon.com Inc. is rapidly advancing its use of robotics, deploying over 750,000 robots to work alongside its employees. The world's second-largest private employer employs 1.5 million people. While that's a lot, it's a decrease of over 100,000 employees from the 1.6 million workers it had in 2021. Meanwhile, the company had 520,000 robots in 2022 and 200,000 robots in 2019. While Amazon is bringing on hundreds of thousands of robots per year, the company is slowly decreasing its employee numbers. The robots, including new models like Sequoia and Digit, are designed to perform repetitive tasks, thereby improving efficiency, safety and delivery speed for Amazon‘s customers. Sequoia, for example, speeds up inventory management and order processing in fulfillment centers, while Digit, a bipedal robot developed in collaboration with Agility Robotics, handles tasks like moving empty tote boxes.

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11 sats \ 3 replies \ @DEADBEEF 22 Apr

So if 750,000 robots replaced 100,000 humans that means 1 human can do the job of 7.5 robots?

16 sats \ 0 replies \ @alt 22 Apr

I imagine one robot can be made to do one task very effectively, but it's hard to make a general-purpose robot. Humans aren't as fast or efficient, but we are smart enough to adapt to various different tasks.

Another way to look at it may be that the human workers were having to do around 7.5 unique tasks as part of their job, and so 7.5 robots are needed to automate that.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nym OP 22 Apr

For now

6 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 22 Apr

This.

7 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 21 Apr

Lame details on the robots in this article. The robot source appears to be this Amazon newsletter from 6 months ago, which says Sequoia is more of a robotic system than a robot:

Building off a series of research and development efforts, Sequoia integrates multiple robot systems to containerize our inventory into totes, bringing together mobile robots, gantry systems, robotic arms, and a new ergonomic employee workstation. The system works by having mobile robots transport containerized inventory directly to a gantry, a tall frame with a platform supporting equipment that can either restock totes or send them to an employee to pick out inventory that customers have ordered.

Digit is bipedal robot that's not even widely deployed yet afaict:

Broadening our partnership with Agility Robotics, we will begin testing their bipedal robot, Digit, for use in our operations. Agility is one of the companies Amazon invested in as part of the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. Digit can move, grasp, and handle items in spaces and corners of warehouses in novel ways. Its size and shape are well suited for buildings that are designed for humans, and we believe that there is a big opportunity to scale a mobile manipulator solution, such as Digit, which can work collaboratively with employees. Our initial use for this technology will be to help employees with tote recycling, a highly repetitive process of picking up and moving empty totes once inventory has been completely picked out of them.

I think they were just trying to make Amazon employing fewer people sexy.