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Boston Globe

Amazon's newest robot gains a sense of touch

In Amazon's vast storage warehouses, such as its Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The company Advertisement Now Vulcan can also Humans will still load many items onto the shelving pods. Vulcan will concentrate on filling cubbies at the lower and higher sections of the eight-foot-tall pods. That should spare the human workers from bending and stretching in ways that could cause repetitive stress injuries. Advertisement 'Vulcan is really good at doing that part of the job,' Dresser said. 'So we provide better work environment, safer work environment, for our employees.' While that may require fewer workers loading the pods, Amazon will add jobs in robot maintenance, Dresser said. 'As we deploy more robots, we need more skilled folks that are helping us with maintenance,' he said. So far the Vulcan robots have only been installed at a facility in Spokane, Washington, and Hamburg, Germany. The plan is to deploy thousands of the touch-sensing bots at warehouses around the world, Dresser said. The team that designed Vulcan named the bot after the Roman god of fire and blacksmithing, he said. 'The team is a builder team and they like this connotation of a forge and building something new,' Dresser said. Amazon has already manufactured more than 750,000 of its other types of robots at its facilities in Westborough and North Reading. The Amazon Robotics unit was created more than a decade ago when the company bought local startup Kiva Systems, helping stoke Aaron Pressman can be reached at