/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/bostonglobe/AUCQY4BT362FNRLTMSG2HCDRUY.jpg)
Tech giant Amazon is giving an undisclosed amount of money to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study the use and impact of robotics.
The effort will include new studies of how employees can interact with robots safely and efficiently in the workplace and a poll of public attitudes towards automation to be conducted by research firm Ipsos, Amazon and MIT said on Wednesday.
The goal is to expand on the three-year “Work of the Future” initiative that resulted in a 2020 report on how automation technologies could create better jobs for people, MIT professor Julie Shah, who leads the Interactive Robotics Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, said in an interview.
Advertisement
“What came out of that task force was a more nuanced understanding that the increasing role of automation is not wholesale supplanting humans’ role, but it’s changing the nature of our jobs,” Shah said. The new research aims “to understand how we can more reliably steer towards a positive vision for the increasing role of this technology.”
MIT researchers will study how robotics are being used at Amazon and other companies, what kinds of implementations have the best return on investment, and how to add automation to enhance worker safety, among other areas, Shah said. MIT has also set up a working group focused on generative artificial intelligence, which powers ChatGPT and other creative AI apps, to study how the technology will impact the workplace, Shah said.
Amazon, which bought Massachusetts-based Kiva Systems in 2012 to kickstart its automation efforts, has installed more than 750,000 robots in its vast warehouse operations. On Wednesday, the company said it was further expanding in robotics by deploying new systems including an automated arm called Sparrow that can select and sort items in its warehouses. Amazon also said it would begin testing a human-like bipedal robot called Digit made by Oregon startup Agility Robotics in its warehouses to collect empty plastic bins.
Advertisement
The goal of the MIT research from Amazon’s perspective is to help companies integrate robots into workplaces to collaborate with human workers, according to Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, who joined the company in 2015, after the Kiva acquisition.
The research is about “learning how people perceive automation which really helps us ensure that us, as the designers of the machines, are mindful of those perceptions,” Brady said in an interview. “It’s humans and machines working together in order to fulfill a task.”
For example, Amazon added a face of sorts to its mobile robot Proteus. In warehouses, the robot’s electronic “eyes” and a “mouth” turn different colors to signal to human workers where the robot is trying to go and what it’s trying to do.
“We design our machines such that people don’t have to adapt to a machine environment,” Brady said. “We design our machines to work in the human environment.”
Adding robots has also made Amazon’s operations safer, Brady said. The rate of “recordable incidents” that involve potential injuries was 15 percent lower at Amazon sites that had robots, and “lost-time incidents” were 18 percent lower, he said.
Amazon turned to MIT for an “independent point of view,” Brady said. “We engaged with MIT because they were a leader in this field when it comes to understanding the nature of work.”
Advertisement
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.