Amazon lifts item handling to 75%

Amazon on May 7, 2025 unveiled Vulcan, a warehouse robot the company said can “feel” items as it picks and stows them inside fulfillment-center storage pods. The system combines force sensors, cameras and control software that lets the robot make contact with products and pod walls instead of treating contact as a failure, according to Amazon. The company said Vulcan can now handle about 75% of the items stored in its fulfillment centers, up from roughly 60% for earlier systems. Amazon disclosed the robot at its Delivering the Future event in Dortmund, Germany, and said it is already operating in Spokane, Washington. ### How is Vulcan different from the robots Amazon already had? Amazon said Vulcan is its first robot with a sense of touch, a distinction the company tied to force and torque sensing built into the robot’s end-of-arm tools. In an Amazon Science post published May 9, 2025, the company said Vulcan’s grippers and suction tools measure force and torque along six axes, allowing the robot to judge how hard it is pressing on objects and back off before force becomes excessive. (aboutamazon.com) Aaron Parness, a director of applied science at Amazon Robotics, said traditional industrial robots are typically designed to avoid contact. “What’s really new and unique and exciting is we are using a sense of touch in addition to vision,” Parness said in the Amazon Science post, describing a system that uses contact both to plan motion and to control it. (aboutamazon.com) ### What exactly is the robot doing inside the warehouse? Amazon said Vulcan is built for two warehouse jobs: stowing items into fabric storage pods and picking targeted items back out. Those pods are divided into cubbies where products are stacked together behind elastic bands, a setup Amazon said makes the task difficult because the robot must touch surrounding items and the pod itself to insert or remove a product. (amazon.science) CNBC reported that Vulcan uses an AI-powered sensor in its gripper to determine the pressure and torque needed for different objects. Amazon said the robot can work on the upper and lower rows of storage pods, jobs that otherwise require workers to use ladders or bend down repeatedly. Kari Freitas Hardy, a front-line employee at Amazon’s GEG1 site in Spokane, said in Amazon’s announcement that “working alongside Vulcan, we can pick and stow with greater ease.” (amazon.science) ### Where does the 75% figure come from? Amazon said Vulcan can pick and stow approximately 75% of the items in its warehouses. CNBC separately reported that earlier systems such as Sparrow handled about 60% of inventory, making the new coverage figure the clearest measure Amazon has given for the upgrade. Third-party trade coverage on May 7, 2025, including The Robot Report, repeated Amazon’s figure that Vulcan can pick and stow about 75% of warehouse items at speeds comparable to human workers. (cnbc.com) Amazon’s own materials did not provide a full SKU count in the sampled passages, but the company consistently framed the advance as broader item coverage inside dense storage pods rather than a general-purpose robot for every warehouse task. ### How far has Amazon deployed it? Amazon said Vulcan had completed a pilot trial by May 2025 and was ready to move into beta testing. The company said the pilot involved six Vulcan Stow robots at a fulfillment center in Spokane, Washington. The next step is larger. Amazon said the beta trial would add another 30 robots in the same Spokane facility, followed by a larger deployment in Germany where Vulcan Stow and Vulcan Pick would operate together. (therobotreport.com) Amazon has also been expanding the broader robotics base that Vulcan will join: the company said on June 30, 2025 that it had deployed its one millionth robot across more than 300 facilities worldwide and launched DeepFleet, a generative AI foundation model to coordinate robot movement. (amazon.science) ### Why does Amazon keep pairing Vulcan with AI language? Amazon has described Vulcan as part of its push into what it calls “physical AI,” a term it used in the May 7, 2025 announcement to describe systems that combine robotics, sensing and machine learning in real-world environments. The company’s June 30, 2025 robotics update separately said DeepFleet, a generative AI foundation model, is designed to improve travel efficiency for its robot fleet by 10%. (amazon.science) Amazon has not said that Vulcan itself is a generative AI model. What the company has said is that Vulcan relies on touch sensing, computer vision and control software to manipulate items in crowded bins, while DeepFleet is the named generative AI system for fleet coordination across the network. ### What should readers watch next? (aboutamazon.com) Amazon said the immediate milestone is beta testing in Spokane with 30 additional robots, followed by a larger Germany deployment that combines picking and stowing. The company’s own disclosures place Vulcan inside a broader automation buildout that reached one million deployed robots by June 30, 2025, giving investors and warehouse-technology rivals a concrete benchmark for how quickly Amazon is scaling new manipulation systems. (amazon.science)