Decoding Amazon's Strategy to Replace Barcodes
Robots may be the way of the future, but it seems that they are not very adept at exploiting a tried-and-true technology: the barcode. Robots struggle to locate barcodes and read those that are attached to objects with unusual shapes since they can be difficult to find.
The corporation announced Friday that it has a strategy to do away with the barcode as a result. With the use of images of the commodities in Amazon warehouses and computer models trained on them, the e-commerce giant has developed a camera system that can monitor items moving one at a time down conveyor belts to make sure they match their images.
Roboticists and AI experts at Amazon eventually intend to combine their technologies to create machines that can recognise things while picking them up and spinning them. Robots should be able to pick up items and process them without first needing to identify and scan a barcode, stressed Nontas Antonakos, an applied science manager at Amazon's computer vision group in Berlin.
It will be simpler for us to supply goods to clients accurately and quickly. Barcodes won't be totally replaced by multi-modal identification just yet. It is currently in use in facilities in Hamburg, Germany, and Barcelona, Spain, according to Amazon. The company asserts that they have already sped up the processing time for packages there.
Given that the technology will be utilised by all of Amazon's businesses, it is possible that a future Whole Foods or another chain owned by Amazon with physical stores may employ it. Other products from Amazon include computer vision technology. Asking 'Alexa, what am I holding?' on an Echo Show smart display will help you identify objects around your home.
Show and Tell is a function that was created with persons who are blind in mind. AI elements, such as automatic photo classification, have also been added by smart phone manufacturers and social media businesses to camera and photo apps. The problem that the technology resolves—incorrect things being shipped to customers—doesn't happen very frequently, said Amazon. However, when you take into account the volume of items a single warehouse processes each day, even isolated errors result in observable slowdowns.