How Amazon Robotics researchers are solving a "beautiful problem" - Amazon Science

The rate of innovation in machine learning is simply off the chart -- what is possible today was barely on the drawing board even a handful of years ago. At Amazon, this has manifested in a robotic system that can not only identify potential space in a cluttered storage bin, but also sensitively manipulate that bin's contents to create that space before successfully placing additional items inside -- a result that, until recently, was impossible. This journey starts when a product arrives at an Amazon fulfillment center (FC). The first order of business is to make it available to customers by adding it to the FC's available inventory. In practice, this means picking it up and stowing it in a storage pod.