Amazon Inks Deal to Advance Warehouse Automation

Amazon has signed a new commercial agreement with robotics software firm Covariant, including hiring the company’s staff, to accelerate automation in its warehouses. 

Through the new agreement, Amazon will receive a non-exclusive license to Covariant’s robotic foundation models. In particular, the aim is to help generalize how Amazon’s robotic systems learn and provide opportunities for how it uses automation going forward.

This will advance on work Amazon has already done to build and incorporate AI models into its robotics for safer and more adaptable systems at scale, including designing new ways for robots to better serve employees and customers.

Covariant’s founding members, Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan, as well as around a quarter of the company’s employees, will also join Amazon’s Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics Team. The group will work to drive the development and implementation of the company’s technology within Amazon’s operations, as well as continue to develop innovative AI solutions. 

Founded in 2017, Covariant builds advanced AI models that enable robots to see, reason and act on the world around them, supporting several warehouse automation tasks.

Amazon said it particularly admired how the company’s team has an iterative and customer-focused approach to developing technologies that solve the toughest challenges in warehouse automation, as well as their deep understanding of that end-to-end process.

Related:AI Robotics Company Gives Robots ‘Human-Like’ Reasoning, Decision-Making Skills

In addition to hiring Covariant staff, Amazon also plans to grow its AI and robotics team in the San Francisco Bay Area, where both companies are based, to further support this work.

“With some of the smartest minds, we will advance fundamental research, marrying our rich expertise to unlock new ways for AI and robots to assist our operations employees,” said Joseph Quinlivan, vice president of Amazon Fulfillment Technologies & Robotics. “Embedding Covariant’s AI technology into our existing robot fleet will make them more performant and create real-world value for our customers.” 

Amazon currently uses AI technology and AWS infrastructure to power hundreds of thousands of mobile robots, robotics arms and other automation systems in its operations.

These include Robin, a stationary robotic arms system and Sequoia a robot that helps identify store inventory and Digit a bipedal robot that can move, grasp and handle items. The latter two Amazon launched last year. All Amazon’s robots rely on AI to understand the physical world and execute tasks safely and reliably alongside humans.