There is a new warehouse robot Amazon It has a touch and allows it to handle work previously only done by humans. Amazon announced a robot called the Vulcan on Wednesday Events in Germany.
CNBC exclusively saw the Vulcan in April as it housed items in a tall yellow bin in a warehouse in Spokane, Washington. A closer look at the robot’s “hands” uses AI-powered sensors to reveal how the items you touch feel and determine the exact pressure and torque each object needs.
This innovative gripper helps to provide the Vulcan with the ability to operate 75% of the 1 million unique items in the Spokane warehouse stock. Amazon has been using other robotic arms in its warehouse since 2021, but they rely on cameras for detection and suction to grasp, limiting what kind of objects they can handle.
Vulcan can also run 20 hours a day, according to Aaron Parness, who heads the Amazon Robotics team that developed the machine.
Amazon Robotics Director Aaron Parness shows CNBC’s Katie Tarasov is the gripper for Vulcan, the latest robot, on April 17, 2025, at the Amazon warehouse in Spokane, Washington.
Joseph Fuerta
Still, Parness told CNBC instead of replacing people in the warehouse, Vulcan would create new, more skilled jobs involving maintaining, manipulating, installing and building robots.
When asked if Amazon would fully automate its warehouses in the future, Parness said “no at all.”
“I don’t believe in 100% automation,” he said. “If you had to do 100% of the stacking and picks in the Vulcan, it would never happen. You’ll wait for a lifetime. Amazon understands this.”
The goal is for the Vulcan to handle 100% of the storage that occurs in the top row of bins. Collecting workers on intermediate-height shelves, the so-called power zone, can reduce the likelihood of injury to workers. Amazon has long struggled with the company’s injuries rates that are far higher than other warehouses, claim These rates have been significantly improved.
“We have a ladder where you have to step into your 10-hour shift dozens of times a day. There are a lot of reach. We have to rush and squat. So that’s a lot of tough physical mechanics.” “As a picker, my days would have been pretty easy with such innovations that allowed me to stay within the power zone.”
According to Amazon, Vulcan works at roughly the same speed as human workers and can handle items up to 8 pounds. It works behind a fence isolated from human workers to reduce the risk of accidents.
Experts agree that humans will work with warehouse robots like Amazon in the near future.
“On the other hand, you build a very complex, automated system and when it breaks, everything stops,” said Bill Ray, a Gartner researcher. “It’s very expensive to take the last person away. It’s very destructive. It’s going to be a big investment and a big risk.”
Freitas Hardy recently moved from picking items to robotic cooperation. She is one of the 350,000 workers who Amazon said has spent $1.2 billion on Upskill since 2019.
“As they’ve been away for decades and they can just come in and take over, so at this point, if you ask me, it’s going to be even more exciting to see the potential for growth because it adds to the work behind the scenes,” Freitas Hardy said.
Freitas Hardy said she wasn’t making more money in her new role, but Amazon said others who are in the mechatronics and robotics apprentice programs typically receive a salary increase of around 40%.
Amazon said the team that developed the Vulcan has grown from a small number to over 250 employees in the three years since the project began. Amazon did not reveal how much it would cost to develop Vulcan, but Parness said it represents a huge business opportunity.
“The Vulcans can interact with the world in a more human-like way, which will provide more process paths that can use automation to reduce the costs customers pay and reduce the speed at which they can deliver those products to their customers,” Parness said.
Another large return on investment can come from robots that are less mistaken than humans.
“Product returns are very high and product returns are very expensive,” Gartner’s Ray said. “Some of them are because the wrong thing was put in the box, and if you can reduce it, it’s about saving money right away.”
Meanwhile, Amazon’s humanoid robot Digit has yet to deliver operational efficiency. In 2023, Amazon announced it was testing Agility Robotics bipedal robots to help organize and move totes, but it has not yet rolled out digits on a large scale.
When asked if the Vulcan would indicate that the robot had moved from the gimmick to a real-world application, Parness said, “It doesn’t matter if the robot has legs or wheels or is bolted to the floor. I think making the robot convenient has that feeling so that it can interact with high contact and high clutter environments.
For now, the Vulcan is fully operational only in the Spokane warehouse. Another version of the Vulcan, where you can select a specific item from stock, has been tested in Hamburg, Germany. Amazon said it plans to add Vulcan to more US and German facilities in 2026.
Watch the video to see exactly how Vulcan works.
