Amazon halts Blue Jay robotics project after less than 6 months

Amazon has deployed hundreds of thousands of robots across its warehouse network, but that doesn’t mean every robotics effort turns into a long-term success story.

The e-commerce giant has halted its Blue Jay warehouse robotics project only months after first unveiling the technology, a move initially reported by Business Insider and later confirmed.

Blue Jay — a multi-armed robot built to sort and move packages — was introduced in October and was intended for use in Amazon’s same-day delivery facilities. At the time of its debut, Amazon said it was testing Blue Jay at a site in South Carolina and noted that the company had developed the robot in far less time than it took to develop some of its other warehouse machines. Amazon said Blue Jay took roughly a year to build, and it credited that speed to advances in AI.

Amazon spokesperson Terrence Clark said Blue Jay had been launched as a prototype, though that was not made clear in the company’s original press release.

Amazon plans to apply Blue Jay’s core technology to other robotics “manipulation programs,” and employees assigned to the Blue Jay effort are being reassigned to other projects.

“We’re always experimenting with new ways to improve the customer experience and make work safer, more efficient, and more engaging for our employees,” Clark said in an email. “In this case, we’re actually accelerating the use of the underlying technology developed for Blue Jay, and nearly all of the technologies are being carried over and will continue to support employees across our network.”

Amazon also introduced the Vulcan robot last year, which operates within the storage compartments in its warehouses. Vulcan is a two-armed system: one arm is designed to rearrange and move items within a compartment, while the other uses a camera and suction cups to pick up products. Amazon has said Vulcan can “feel” the objects it touches and that it was trained on data collected from real-world interactions.

Amazon has been building its internal robotics program since 2012, when it acquired Kiva Systems, a robotics company whose warehouse automation became a foundation for Amazon’s fulfilment operations. Amazon said it passed 1 million robots in its warehouses last July.