SAN MARCOS, Texas — Just off Interstate 35, midway between San Antonio and Austin, the newest member of Amazon’s robotic fleet has been training for more than a year in a real-world pilot program, helping to move hundreds of thousands of individual products on their way to customers.
It’s called Sparrow, and it’s ready for its next assignment.
Just don’t expect it to pick up a book.
Standing 8 feet tall inside a protective metal structure at Amazon’s fulfillment center here, Sparrow has learned to handle a wide variety of items using suction cups on the tips of seven actuators at the end of its multi-jointed robotic arm, leveraging advanced machine learning and computer vision technologies.
Just as important, Sparrow has also learned which items it can’t pick up. Take heart, Amazon warehouse workers: one of them is the company’s original product.
“There are certain things that it has a tough time picking up,” explained Kyle Betts, Amazon Sparrow senior technical product manager, citing hardcover books as an example. “The dust jacket will come off, and the book will come down.”
But those situations are increasingly becoming the exception.
Publicly unveiled last fall, Sparrow is the next stage in the evolution of Amazon’s robots. It’s capable of picking up individual products of many different shapes and sizes, not just cardboard boxes and padded mailers.
That capability makes Sparrow the biggest test yet of Amazon’s assertion that robots, working in collaboration with humans, will improve the safety and efficiency of its fulfillment centers, boosting productivity, capacity, and revenue, and ultimately resulting in more jobs, not less — at least within its own operations.
“I think the evidence is pretty clear: the more robots that we add, the more jobs we’re creating,” said Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics. He cited the company’s creation of more than a million jobs in its fulfillment network in the past 10 years, even as Amazon added hundreds of thousands of robots.
Still to be determined is the long-term impact on the broader economy, wages, and work as we know it. The effects will be closely watched by union leaders, regulators, and legislators, given the implications for Amazon’s workforce.
In the meantime, Sparrow is a case study in the progress and remaining hurdles for warehouse robots.
Expanding the Sparrow deployment
Up to this point, there has been one Sparrow robotic unit at work in Amazon’s operations, integrated into the operations of the San Marcos fulfillment center, better known inside the company as “SAT2.”
But that will soon change. Citing the robot’s progress in learning how to pick up and handle items in the San Marcos pilot, Amazon says it will expand the deployment this fall with multiple Sparrow units in its fulfillment operations in Houston, serving as the next step in what’s expected to ultimately become a broader rollout.
“Sparrow, long-term, is going to have a lot of different capabilities,” Betts said. “Anytime there’s an item that needs to be picked up (and moved) from one container to another, Sparrow will eventually be doing that sort of thing.”
Overall, the company said last fall that Sparrow could handle about 65% of the more than 100 million items in its inventory. The decision to expand the Sparrow deployment comes after the robot’s capabilities were tested and refined as part of the real-world operations at the San Marcos fulfillment center.
Other examples include shoe boxes with unsecured lids, and products in unsealed bags. Those commonly result in “defects,” the Amazon term for situations in which the robotic arm mishandles an item.
Betts said Sparrow reduced its defect rate by 65% last year as part of the pilot program, by learning how to better handle and avoid different items. This was “the inflection point enabling us to go to Houston in the fall,” he said.
The path to Amazon Sparrow
The original inflection point for Amazon’s move into robotics was its acquisition of Kiva Robotics more than 10 years ago. Kiva’s robots were the predecessor to Amazon’s current mobile drive units, nicknamed Hercules, that can pick up and move large shelving units. There are now more than 750,000 Hercules units across the company’s fulfillment network.
More recent additions include Proteus, an autonomous mobile drive unit designed to operate safely alongside humans on the warehouse floor; and Robin, robotic arms that handle and sort packages. Amazon says more than 1,000 Robin arms have been deployed across its operations network.
Sparrow was unveiled in November, with testing in San Marcos well under way.
In the San Marcos facility, Sparrow has been engaged in “singulating,” the process of picking an individual product from a tote that contains multiple items, and placing that single product in a tray. A conveyor belt then takes the tray to another part of the fulfillment process on its way to an Amazon package.
As part of the process, the Sparrow system’s cameras and scanners identify the product and also look for damage.
In the Houston deployment later this year, Amazon plans to use four Sparrow robots to consolidate products in totes, a key step in Amazon’s containerized storage system, which is designed in part to deliver totes to Amazon workers in their ergonomic “Goldilocks zone,” seeking to further reduce the risk of injury.
As illustrated by the Sparrow pilot program in Texas, Amazon prefers to test its robots in working facilities, with real packages and products. The team at SAT2, the San Marcos fulfillment center, has hosted multiple pilots, collaborating and providing feedback to members of the Amazon robotics group who work on-site.
Without that collaboration, “we wouldn’t be able to move on to that next level. We wouldn’t be able to progress the technology, and productize this as something that goes into other fulfillment centers,” said Betts. “It has upgraded and sped up our development process immeasurably.”
