Amazon has lots of of hundreds of robots in its warehouses, however that doesn’t imply all of its robotic initiatives are a hit story.
The ecommerce big has halted its Blue Jay warehouse robotics challenge simply months after unveiling the tech, as initially reported by Enterprise Insider and confirmed by TechCrunch.
Blue Jay, a multi-armed robotic designed to kind and transfer packages, was unveiled in October to be used within the firm’s same-day supply amenities. On the time, the corporate was testing the robots at a facility in South Carolina and stated it took Amazon considerably much less time to develop Blue Jay — solely a couple of 12 months— than it did to develop its different warehouse robots, a pace the corporate credited to developments in AI.
Amazon spokesperson Terrance Clark advised TechCrunch that Blue Jay was launched as a prototype — though that was not made clear within the firm’s authentic press launch.
The corporate plans to make use of Blue Jay’s core expertise for different robotics “manipulation applications” with workers who labored on Blue Jay being moved to different tasks.
“We’re all the time experimenting with new methods to enhance the client expertise and make work safer, extra environment friendly, and extra participating for our workers,” Clark advised TechCrunch over e mail. “On this case, we’re truly accelerating the usage of the underlying expertise developed for Blue Jay, and practically the entire applied sciences are being carried over and can proceed to help workers throughout our community.”
Amazon additionally unveiled the Vulcan robotic final 12 months, which is used within the storage compartments of the corporate’s warehouses. Vulcan is a two-armed robotic, with one arm meant to rearrange and transfer objects in a compartment whereas the opposite is provided with a digital camera and suction cups to seize items. The Vulcan can allegedly “really feel” the objects that it touches and was educated on information gathered from real-world interactions.
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June 23, 2026
Amazon has been growing its inner robotics program since 2012 when it bought Kiva Programs, a robotics firm whose warehouse automation expertise fashioned the inspiration of Amazon’s achievement operations. It surpassed 1 million robots in its warehouses final July.
