Amazon on Wednesday unveiled its first fully autonomous mobile robot called Proteus that autonomously moves through facilities using advanced safety, perception and navigation technology developed by the company.
The robot was built to be automatically directed to perform its work and move around employees and does not need to be confined to restricted areas.
“It can operate in a manner that augments simple, safe interaction between technology and people, such as the lifting and movement of GoCarts, the non-automated, wheeled transports used to move packages through our facilities,” Amazon said in a statement.
Proteus will initially be deployed in the outbound GoCart handling areas in Amazon fulfilment centres and sort centres.
The aim is to automate GoCart handling throughout the network, which will help reduce the need for people to manually move heavy objects.
Amazon has more than 520,000 robotic drive units, and has added over a million jobs, worldwide.
Amazon will also add Cardinal, a robotic arm capable of lifting weights up to 50 pounds. The company aims to deploy the robotic arms in its warehouses sometime next year.
“With Cardinal, package sorting happens earlier in the shipping process, resulting in faster process time in the facility. Amazon shipping operations run more smoothly because Cardinal converts batch-based manual work into continuous, automated work,” the company said.
Amazon has also created Amazon Robotics Identification (AR ID), an AI-powered scanning capability to enable easier scanning of packages in facilities, which is currently being done manually.