Amazon finds something else AI can do better than humans: Spotting damaged goods
Amazon is reportedly deploying artificial intelligence to inspect goods and look for signs of damage before they are packed and shipped to people.
Jeremy Wyatt, director of applied science at Amazon Robotics, said workers today check the quality of items as they package and sort them – but they often fail to spot damaged products, since they're apparently not very common. "That's cognitively demanding because obviously you're looking for something that's rare and it's not your primary job," WyattFewer than one in 1,000 products are damaged, or so we're told, meaning staff probably don't encounter them much and don't pay as much attention to the problem. But Amazon processes billions of packages every year, so the number of botched items is significant.
The software works by scanning objects placed into bins to detect signs of wear and tear at imaging stations. If an item is flagged, an Amazon employee will double check if it's broken and decide if it can be packaged and shipped or not. The technology has been rolled out at two warehouses so far. According to Christoph Schwerdtfeger, a software development manager at Amazon, it's three times more likely to spot damaged goods than a human employee. The AI was trained to learn how to identify common visual features for broken items by comparing images of products that were not damaged to ones that were, he said.
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