AMAZON built an e-commerce empire by automating much of the work needed to move goods and pack orders in its warehouses. There is still plenty of work for humans in those vast facilities because some tasks are too complex for robots to do reliably. But a new robot, called Sparrow, could shift the balance that Amazon strikes between people and machines.

Sparrow is designed to pick out items piled in shelves or bins so they can be packed into orders for shipping to customers. That’s one of the most difficult tasks in warehouse robotics, because there are so many different objects, each with different shapes, textures, and malleability, that can be piled up haphazardly.

It takes on that challenge by using machine learning and cameras to identify objects piled in a bin and plan how to grab one using a custom gripper with several suction tubes.

Amazon demonstrated Sparrow for the first time at the company’s robotics manufacturing facility in Massachusetts earlier this month.

Amazon is currently testing Sparrow at a facility in Texas, where the robot is already sorting products for customer orders.

The company says Sparrow can handle 65 per cent of the more than 100 million items in its inventory.

Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, says that range is the most impressive thing about the robot.

“No one has the inventory that Amazon has,” he says. Sparrow can grasp DVDs, socks, and stuffies, but still struggles with loose or complex packaging.