Amazon has hundreds of thousands of robots in its warehouses, but that doesn’t mean all of its robotic initiatives are a success story.
The ecommerce giant has halted its Blue Jay warehouse robotics project just months after unveiling the tech, as originally reported by Business Insider and confirmed by TechCrunch.
Blue Jay, a multi-armed robot designed to sort and move packages, was unveiled 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 to develop Blue Jay — only about a year— than it did to develop its other warehouse robots, a speed the company credited to advancements in AI.
Amazon spokesperson Terrance Clark told TechCrunch that Blue Jay was launched as a prototype — although that was not made clear in the company’s original press release.
The company plans to use Blue Jay’s core technology for other robotics “manipulation programs” with employees who worked on Blue Jay being moved 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 over email. “In this case, we’re actually accelerating the use of the underlying technology developed for Blue Jay, and nearly all of the technologies are being carried over and will continue to support employees across our network.”
Amazon also unveiled the Vulcan robot last year, which is used in the storage compartments of the company’s warehouses. Vulcan is a two-armed robot, with one arm meant to rearrange and move items in a compartment while the other is equipped with a camera and suction cups to grab goods. The Vulcan can allegedly “feel” the objects that it touches and was trained on data gathered from real-world interactions.
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Amazon has been developing its internal robotics program since 2012 when it purchased Kiva Systems, a robotics company whose warehouse automation technology formed the foundation of Amazon’s fulfillment operations. It surpassed 1 million robots in its warehouses last July.