Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, led reporters on a tour of the company’s Baltimore warehouse during which he said it would be “at least 10 years” before Amazon could entirely automate the fulfillment process.
“In the current form, the technology is very limited,” Anderson said, according to Reuters. “The technology is very far from the fully automated workstation that we would need.”
The problem with bots is that they simply aren’t as adept as humans at the actual process of picking up merchandise — they either damage other products when trying to snag one item out of a bin, or they only pick up one piece of merch when it might be most efficient to grab several.
Training robots to handle and pack fresh food at Amazon warehouses is especially challenging.
For example just imagine if you want any fruit and I want my fruit to be firm, others like their fruit to be ripe. How do you get a robot to choose that?
Still, while robots might not be able to pick the perfect produce just yet, the systems are continuously getting more advanced — making Anderson’s 10-year prediction seem like it might even be on the conservative side.
