Meet Amazon’s robot, Vulcan, the first with a sense of touch

There’s a new warehouse robot at Amazon that has a sense of touch, allowing it to handle a job previously only done by humans. Amazon unveiled the robot, called Vulcan, Wednesday at an event in Germany.

CNBC got an exclusive first look at Vulcan in April, as it stowed items into tall, yellow bins at a warehouse in Spokane, Washington. An up-close look at the “hand” of the robot reveals how it can feel the items it touches using an AI-powered sensor to determine the precise pressure and torque each object needs.

This innovative gripper helps give Vulcan the ability to manipulate 75% of the 1 million unique items in inventory at the Spokane warehouse. Amazon has used other robotic arms inside its warehouses since 2021, but those rely on cameras for detection and suction for grasp, limiting what types of objects they can handle. 

Vulcan can also operate 20 hours a day, according to Aaron Parness, who heads up the Amazon Robotics team that developed the machine.

Still, Parness told CNBC that instead of replacing people in its warehouses, Vulcan will create new, higher skilled jobs that involve maintaining, operating, installing and building the robots. 

When asked if Amazon will fully automate warehouses in the future, Parness said, “not at all.”

“I don’t believe in 100% automation,” he said. “If we had to get Vulcan to do 100% of the stows and picks, it would never happen. You would wait your entire life. Amazon understands this.”

The goal is for Vulcan to handle 100% of the stowing that happens in the top rows of bins, which are difficult for people to reach, Parness said. Limiting workers to stowing on mid-height shelves, the so-called power zone, could lower the chance for worker injuries. Amazon has long struggled with injury rates far higher than those at other warehouses, though the company claims those rates have improved significantly. 

“We have a ladder that we have to step onto several dozen times a day during your ten hour shift. There is a lot of reaching. We have to lunge and squat. So it’s a lot of tough body mechanics,” said Kari Freitas Hardy, an Amazon worker in Spokane. “As a picker, if I had an innovation like this where I could have stayed within my power zone, my days would have been just so much easier.”

Amazon said Vulcan is operating at about the same speed as a human worker and can handle items up to 8 pounds. It operates behind a fence, sequestered from human workers to reduce the risk of accidents.

Experts agree that humans will work alongside robots in warehouses like Amazon’s for the foreseeable future.

“Whereas if you build a terribly complicated automated system and it breaks, then everything stops,” said Bill Ray, a researcher at Gartner. “Taking out the last human is so expensive. It’s so disruptive. It would be a huge investment and…