THELASTMILE Logistics Outside the Box
ENTER: A WAREHOUSE ROBOT WITH FINESSE “Numb and dumb” no more, the new Vulcan robot from Amazon features a capability that has eluded robotics: a sense of touch. The result? Tangible benefits for order fulfillment.
“In the past, when industrial robots have unexpected contact, they either emergency stop or smash through that contact. They often don’t even know they have hit something because they cannot sense it.” AARON PARNESS, director of applied science, Amazon Robotics, who described the typical robot as “numb and dumb”
Supply Chain Job Vulcan stows and picks items in a mobile robotic inventory system in Amazon fulfillment centers. The robot places products in fabric-covered compartments, which hold up to 10 items on average. Each bin has elastic bands which prevent items from falling out. Fitting an object into or grasping one out of this small space favors the natural dexterity of humans while robots excel at optimizing space usage.
Special Skillset Vulcan is Amazon’s first robot with touch perception—it can understand when and how it makes contact with an object. Because of its sense of touch, Vulcan is the first robot that can mimic human finesse and dexterity. It manipulates objects within the bins to make room for whatever it’s stowing, perceiving when it makes contact and how much force to apply. Vulcan uses end-of-arm tooling and force feedback sensors to determine how hard it’s pushing or how firmly it’s holding something. It can adjust its grip strength based on the item’s size and shape.
What’s Next More than 14 billion items are stowed by hand every year at Amazon warehouses. Amazon’s target: Vulcan robots to stow 80% of these items at a rate of 300 items per hour, while operating 20 hours per day. Extensive Training Amazon’s stow system is operating three times as fast as it was 18 months ago, Parness told IEEE Spectrum in May 2025. Parness and his team improved the robot’s stowing speed and reliability over more than 500,000 stows in warehouses; Vulcan is now slightly faster than the average stowing human.
Source: Amazon; IEEE Spectrum
88 Inbound Logistics • May 2025
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