Amazon's Robots Are Ready for the Next Step

Machines that deftly move a range of products without crushing or dropping them could transform the warehouse

- By Stacie Sherman and Joshua Brustein

Amazon.com Inc., which churns through hourly workers, has long expected to one day run out of people to hire for its US fulfillment centers—an existential problem for an enterprise that made its name providing quick, reliable delivery. The e-commerce giant’s warehouses are partly automated, but Amazon still relies on hundreds of thousands of humans working in concert with the machines.

One solution to the labor shortage, of course, is more robots. But for years, engineers have struggled to duplicate a human’s manual dexterity. Now Amazon may have solved the problem with Sparrow, a yellow robotic arm that the company says can pick up millions of types of products without crushing or dropping them.

Amazon hasn’t said precisely how Sparrow and its machine cousins will revolutionize its operations. But patent filings, corporate blog posts and executive comments reveal a road map of the company’s ambitions. Robots will stow and retrieve individual items, move packaged boxes into carts for shipment and pilot those carts to waiting trucks—labor now handled mostly by people. The technology is still buggy, and full deployment will probably take years. But the automated system promises to fundamentally reshape Amazon, which has grown into the second-largest private US employer, after Walmart Inc., and in many towns is the default option for workers who have few marketable skills or were laid off from other jobs.