Meet 'Digit' Amazon's Humanoid Robot
Meet 'Digit' Amazon's Humanoid Robot #shorts
Amazon trials humanoid robots to 'free up' staff #robots #artificialintelligence
Amazon is trialling humanoid robots in its US warehouses. It's the latest sign of the tech giant automating more of its operations.
Amazon said the move was about "freeing employees up to better deliver for our customers".
It's testing a new robot called Digit, which has arms and legs and can move, grasp, and similarly handle items to a human.
A union said Amazon had "been treating their workers like robots for years".
"Amazon's automation is head-first race to job losses. We've already seen hundreds of jobs disappear to it in fulfillment centers," said Stuart Richards, an organizer at UK trade union GMB.
As the announcement was made, Amazon said its robotics systems had helped create "hundreds of thousands of new jobs" within its operations.
"This includes 700 categories of new job types, in skilled roles, which didn't exist within the company beforehand," the firm said.
According to the tech giant, it now has more than 750,000 robots working "collaboratively" with its human staff, often being used to take on "highly repetitive tasks".
Amazon Robotics' chief technologist, Tye Brady, told reporters at a media briefing in Seattle that people were "irreplaceable", and disputed the suggestion that the company could have fully-automated warehouses in the future.
"There's not any part of me that thinks that would ever be a reality," he said.
"People are so central to the fulfillment process; the ability to think at a higher level, the ability to diagnose problems."
Digit walks on two legs. It also has arms that can pick up and move packages, containers, customer orders and objects.
Amazon has ramped up its use of robots in recent years.