Amazon's robots and its larger vision for work
GeekWire
GeekWire
4.4 • 116 Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2023
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, joins us on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast to talk about the company's latest warehouse robots, explaining how they represent the emergence of the larger vision that prompted him to join Amazon more than eight years ago. Our conversation at Amazon HQ in Seattle followed a trip by GeekWire's Todd Bishop to Austin and San Marcos, Texas, to see many of Amazon's newest autonomous robots first-hand.
Related coverage:
- New robots are making Amazon’s warehouses more efficient — can they also make them safer?
- Video: Amazon's Robots, explained
- Amazon’s Sparrow is leaving the nest: Trailblazing warehouse robot is ready for a wider rollout
- Video: Up close with Amazon's Sparrow Robot
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to GeekWire, I'm Todd Bishop, and this summer I traveled to Austin and San |
| 0:05.4 | Marcos Texas to get a glimpse of Amazon's newest warehouse robots. They |
| 0:11.0 | included one called Sparrow, which is an autonomous robotic arm that can pick up a wide variety of individual products, not just boxes and envelopes. |
| 0:21.0 | How many Sparrows are there out there in the world in Amazon fulfillment centers? |
| 0:27.0 | So this is the first one and the only one currently operating in Amazon Film Centers. |
| 0:34.0 | I feel like I'm kind of in the presence of a celebrity. |
| 0:37.0 | There was also Robin, a widely deployed type of Amazon robotic arm that handled a billion packages, or one-eighth of the company's |
| 0:45.1 | overall package volume last year. |
| 0:47.1 | We're about to come back on break in 15 minutes. |
| 0:50.1 | Robin didn't take a lunch break. |
| 0:52.1 | That is correct. I learned a lot but it was also a lot to take in so after returning to |
| 0:57.2 | Seattle I met at Amazon headquarters with Ty Brady a former MIT spacecraft engineer with decades of experience in robotics. |
| 1:06.2 | He's now the chief technologist for Amazon robotics. |
| 1:09.4 | I showed him my pictures and videos from Texas, and he helped me further understand what I saw in |
| 1:14.7 | Amazon's fulfillment centers. And one last video here... This is fun. I don't know what |
| 1:20.0 | you're gonna pop up here. It could be anything. Our palatizer? This is a palatizer, okay. So does this have a fancy bird name? |
| 1:27.3 | This is before the age of bird names. |
| 1:31.8 | Unless there's a bird called robotic palatizer. |
| 1:36.0 | One of the leaders at the Austin facility told me that he'd like to call this one Sir Stacks a lot. |
| 1:43.0 | Right. |
| 1:45.0 | And then the other one said he wanted to name it after himself. |
| 1:47.8 | Okay, all right. |
... |
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