Amazon already relies on robotics for some of the operations in its massive logistics network but it’s not completely automated yet. There’s no denying the fact that the company’s use of robotics and artificial intelligence to further automated its warehouses is going to increase in the coming years. Will we see a fully automated shipping warehouse that’s manned only by robots? Amazon doesn’t think that’s going to happen for at least a decade.
Amazon’s director of robotics fulfillment Scott Anderson says that it will probably be at least 10 years before an Amazon warehouse is fully automated end-to-end. That would mean the robots would do everything from picking up individual orders and dispatching them.
Anderson was addressing a misperception that Amazon will be able to run fully automated warehouses in the near future. He made his comments during a tour of the company’s Baltimore warehouse for reports this week.
This seems to suggest that Amazon feels that it can’t rely on the technology for a robot to pick up a single product from the shelves without damaging it or pick up multiple products at the same time before they’re packaged and dispatched to the customer.
“In the current form, the technology is very limited. The technology is very far from the fully automated workstation that we would need,” Anderson said. He did add that Amazon is looking at a variety of technology to further automate the various steps in its warehouses.