Amazon says new Vulcan warehouse robot has human touch but wont replace humans

This week Amazon debuted a new warehouse robot that has a sense of "touch," but the company also promised its new bot will not replace human warehouse workers. On Monday, at Amazon's Delivering the Future event in Dortmund, Germany, the retail giant introduced the world to Vulcan, a robot designed to sort, pick up, and place objects in storage compartments with the finesse and dexterity of human hands. Instead, the robot's "end of arm tooling" looks like a "ruler stuck onto a hair straightener," as Amazon describes it. The Vulcan warehouse robot is also loaded with cameras and feedback sensors to process when it makes contact with items and how much force to apply to prevent damage. In its warehouses, Amazon's inventory is stored in soft fabric compartments of about one square foot in size.