I went to Germany to find out about Amazon's new AI robots with sense of touch - one day they could be in your house

Using AI technology as well as a spatula-like gripping tool and sensors, they are able to stow away and pick up items and are capable of handling around three-quarters of the products Amazon sells, working at similar speeds to humans.

With eight-foot high ‘pods’ used to sort inventory in Amazon centres, the company says the new robots can help worker safety by picking items from the highest and lowest points of pods.

The technology is expected to be rolled out to UK distribution centres, including several in Yorkshire, over the next three years.

Aaron Parness, Amazon’s director of robotics AI, told the Dortmund event: “Vulcan was designed to handle a very thorny challenge in robotics, the task of moving through highly-cluttered environments where you make a lot of contact with items.

"It is built to work in the real world. We are at the start of a golden age for robotics.

"Safely handling items in a highly-cluttered environment has applications way beyond our fulfilment centres.”

When asked after his announcement by The Yorkshire Post about what the other applications could potentially be, Mr Parness said Amazon may be able to use the technology for packing multiple orders, putting delivery bags into delivery vans and handling groceries.

He said: "I absolutely believe the sense of touch, the use of video along with that touch and building out physical AI that can be intelligent and reason about what it feels and sees has hundreds of applications, a lot of them at Amazon.

"If you go beyond Amazon fulfilment, [you are] talking about retail spaces and healthcare spaces. Very long-term our homes are the most cluttered environment we regularly inhabit. You need touch and vision to do any of those kinds of tasks.

"That version that comes in 20 years will be standing on the shoulders of the advances we have made in the last few years.”

When asked what potential applications the robots could be used for in the home, Mr Parness said it is difficult to be definitive about future developments – citing the difference between the robot maid portrayed in the 1960s cartoon The Jetsons with the existence of robotic vacuum cleaners in the present day.

"It is really hard to speculate. In my personal opinion, robots we end up building don’t look like the things we might imagine.

"Your robot vacuum cleaner doesn’t look like Rosie [the robot from The Jetsons] pushing a vacuum, it looks like a hockey puck. As we think about robotics in the home, it is very difficult to say. I know they will have a sense of touch and sight but whether it is arms or something else, it is very difficult to know and you should be a little sceptical of anyone who tells you they do know.”

Mr Parness, who previously worked at NASA, said creating the Vulcan robots after years of work by an initially small team that grew to 250 people is the highlight of his working life.

"It is the biggest achievement of my career, the most meaningful advance of our state of knowledge,” he said.

"It is a very different kind of robotics. I’m plenty proud of stuff I’ve done before. But this is a bigger impact. This is a more substantial contribution to the field of robotics.”

He said it had been a “high-risk, high-reward” project he was unsure would work.

"At first I was just helping a guy in the lab that I liked and it was a really hard problem I didn’t think was going to go anywhere,” he said.

"But three to six months into the project, when we came up with the extendable spatula in the end of the arm tool, that was a lightbulb moment.

"I went from ‘this is never going to happen’ to ‘I’m putting all my energy into this and this is why I’m at Amazon’.”

Mr Parness added that delivering the project to fruition had been a true team effort.

"My team is awesome and when I think of Vulcan, I don’t think of the product.

"I think of the team and the people we’ve hired and grown.”

Roles of Yorkshire distribution workers will change

Workers in Amazon distribution centres in Yorkshire will see their jobs change rather than be replaced by the company’s new robotics technology, says Aaron Parness.

When asked by The Yorkshire Post what his message would be to regional workers concerned about what the rollout of Vulcan robots will mean for their jobs, he said: “"As we’ve introduced robots historically, and we have put 750,000 robots into our network, we’ve seen along with that hundreds of thousands of new jobs and we expect the same with Vulcan. Jobs will change.

"We expect no substantial change in the number of employees in a building. We launched a new generation building in Louisiana which has ten times more types of robots. Despite having so much more robotics, that building has the same number of employees – 2,500.”

He said frontline workers can be retrained to do more technical and better-paid operational roles while adding Amazon plans for Vulcan robots to work alongside humans rather than instead of them.

"Amazon is trying to design the best fulfilment system, we don’t believe that’s 100 per cent automation. We think having humans and robots working side by side [is best], our employees are so good at problem solving."