Amazon robotics expert Aaron Parness tells the Daily Star where we stand in any coming android apocalypse after developing a robot that can touch things
If you want to survive an onslaught of AI-powered robots, live by the sea. That’s the advice from Amazon robotics boffin Aaron Parness, who knows how close we are to being enslaved by mechanical overlords.
He’s just developed a robot that can feel – well, touch – and he has some good news… The Terminator isn’t coming for us any time soon.
Aaron tells the Daily Star: “I think people who work in robotics know how clumsy they still are and how far away we are from those kinds of sci-fi scenarios of taking over the world. It won’t happen in my lifetime, that’s for sure.
“I think there’s a lot of overblown concern about Terminator-style scenarios. The optimist in me believes that it will never happen because the people who are designing robots want them to be useful.
“Enslaving the human race isn’t useful and the people in charge will have an early signal on stopping that.”
And he has a simple tip if you want to survive any impending AI-powered robot apocalypse – move to the seaside.
Aaron adds: “If I’m having fun, the answer I would say as to why it won’t happen is like, saltwater. I’ll just throw a little bit of that at them – robots hate saltwater. And stairs.”
While robots are known for not being able to feel, Aaron has now developed one who can do just that. Vulcan has a sense of touch – useful in the company’s vast warehouses, where it can now pick up delicate items for packing and not break them. Well, hopefully.
The director of applied science in Robotics and AI, to give him his full title, gave Vulcan the ability by adding force and torque sensors to his motion plans and controls loops. In layman’s terms, he knows exactly how to grab things.
And Aaron believes this will lead to massive advances in how we use robots in our daily lives.
“Being able to touch things is a fundamental building block,” he says. “Going forward you want them to help cleaning up the garage or the kids’ messy rooms.
“If you want them to push hospitals trolleys or fold the washing, then you need robots that can sense and manipulate things. The hands are an underrated human organ. Everybody gives the brain all the credit, but hands are absolutely amazing. We’re getting there. It’s going to change the way we use robots for decades to come.”
But nothing’s perfect and Adam and his team often laugh about the shortcomings of their sometimes hapless bots.
He adds: “We have a party every Friday on my team where we drink beer and watch back all the mistakes the robot made that week. Some bots just go silent. They stop moving and you have to go through the software to see what happened.
“Others are just clumsy. We had one with a pouch of yoghurt. But it was squeezing too hard and there was yoghurt squirting out everywhere, so we had to find just the amount it was squeezing. So we look at the videos and then try and think about how to build a better system.”
And even though 75% of the over 15 billion items that were delivered in 2024 were assisted by a robot – they do have weak spots.
“They’re all clumsy in their own ways sometimes,” says Aaron. “You have to predict what situations or which items the robot really struggles with.
“It can’t really pick up a tennis ball on a conveyor belt and black shiny plastic bags are really tricky for computer vision, so we had to stop them dealing with those sort of items.”
Vulcan will be capable of assisting with three quarters of the items in every warehouse, Aaron says. But he insists: “I don’t think robots will ever do all that a human can.
“What we are doing is trying to take the repetitive and the mundane work and automating that. But there’s always going be a place where humans are doing the decision making and the problem solving.”
#Boffin #reveals #robots #world
