Proteus, Amazon’s First Fully Autonomous Warehouse Robot
Humans have been concerned about their jobs, as in the coming few years robotscan replace them in their job profile. The worries people may come to the realization soon as robots at workplaces are increasing to cut down the expenses of the company.
Amazon, a multinational company has announced its ‘first fully autonomous mobile robot’, “Proteus” which will be used to move large carts throughout its warehouses. Well, the company claims that it can securely navigate around the human employees, unlike their previous inventions which were made to be kept in a caged area. The company even claims that the Proteus contains “advanced safety, perception, and navigation technology” and one of their videos shows off the robot's moves. When an employee steps inside the beam of the green light shining in front, the robot stops its movement and automatically resumes its work after the person is moved away from the robot.
The company will be coming up with other robotic systems which are aimed to introduce in warehouses by next year, one of them is called “Cardinal”. It is a robotic arm that can lift and move packages that weigh up to 50 pounds. It even shows off its new displayed tech that allowed employees to stand in front of the camera that identifies the package without scanning the label.
Despite all the new technologies that seemed to be fascinating but it arouses the biggest labor concern. One of the reports of Amazon suggests that there would be a huge difficulty in finding work soon but Amazon claims that it would not incorporate robots to replace the human employees. Amazon’s robotic division told Forbes, “replacing people with machines is just a fallacy,” and if they do so their business will get bankrupt.
However, Amazon claims that robots can play a massive role in setting a work pace that humans can cope with easily. Along with this, it will increase safety as it would “reduce the need for people to move heavy objects manually.” It will limit the injury rates in the warehouses systematically.
Lastly, the company is also working on creating a robot that can deliver containers to the employees instead of having them bend and climb to reach different items.