PickerRobot
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Amazon is reportedly building ‘picker’ robots for fulfillment centers
In order to fulfil its many orders in a timely fashion, Amazon employs a large number of people, and a key part to the company's order fulfillment process are pickers. These employees are the ones that pick items from fulfillment center shelves, collect them into bins and send them to packers that put them all together into boxes to be mailed out. So far, this job has been carried out by humans, but The Information reports that the company is working on robots that can do the task on their own.
Robotic armpit sweats you out of harm's way, Uncanny Valley just got a lot stinkier
London-based designer Kevin Grennan has a particular stance on the yet-to-be-fought Robots vs Humans war -- it'll stink, literally. Mocking a part of our bodies we spackle to stop secretions, this Brit created a robotic armpit that sweats out pheromones so you stay out of danger. As part of his graduate exhibit at the Royal College of Art, our android-averse artiste has three smelly cyborg concepts up for your schematic consideration: there's the underarm-equipped, bomb-sniffing bot that'll warn you away with the scent of human fear, and a picker robot that enchants female assembly liners to work harder, better, faster with its manly musk. Sure it all seems harmless, that is until you enter into a trusting relationship with an oxytocin-spritzing surgical automaton. We don't blame you if any of the above has you locking the Roomba up for the night -- that's exactly Kevin's point. But there's no need to panic just yet, a future filled with "but I'm a real boy" robot-complexes is still a ways off.
