Amazon has purportedly engineered a novel warehousing automaton, dubbed Vulcan, endowed with a haptic sensing capability that facilitates tactile discrimination among a subset of handled objects.

The bimanous Vulcan, engineered to navigate within Amazon's warehouse storage compartments, employs haptic sensors to discern contact with objects, its dual manipulators exhibiting distinct functionalities: one dedicated to reconfiguring items within a compartment, the other, outfitted with an integrated camera and suction mechanism, tasked with item retrieval.

Amazon posits that Vulcan, having undergone tutelage incorporating empirical datasets, such as haptic and tactile feedback, is adept at selecting approximately three-quarters of its inventory, and furthermore, is endowed with a capacity for autonomous iterative amelioration. This robotic system has been operationalised in facilites located in Spokane, Washington, and Hamburg, Germany, where it has, to date, processed a cumulative volume of half a million discrete consignments.

Vulcan represents merely the most recent augmentation to Amazon's constellation of warehousing automatons, deployed in their hundreds of thousands for the expedited execution of customer requisitions throughout its global repository network, a move that, whilst decried by detractors as a manoeuvre aimed at supplanting human labour, Amazon staunchly defends as purely instrumental in enhancing the safety protocols within its logistical centres.