The warehouse robot, called Vulcan, will use touch to rummage around shelves and find the right product to ship to customers.

The bot is a key step in making robots as tactile as humans and the development could allow them to take on more manufacturing work in the years to come.

Aaron Parness, Amazon's director of robotics AI who has led the development of Vulcan, explained that touch helps the cyborg push items along a shelf before deciding what it wants.

He said: "When you're trying to stow (or pick) items in one of these pods, you can't really do that task without making contact with the other items."

The Vulcan system features a conventional robotic arm with a custom spatula-style appendage for poking into a shelf and a sucker for grabbing items and pulling them out.

Amazon revealed Vulcan at a fulfillment centre in Hamburg, Germany on Wednesday (07.05.25) and the tech giant confirmed that the robot is already working at the facility and at another in Spokane, Washington.

The bots will be working on the same line as the human pickers and intends to spare them from back-breaking work by retrieving items from shelves that are either high up or low down.

Items that the robot decides it is unable to find will be reassigned to human staff.

Ken Goldberg, a roboticist at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "Amazon stores many different products in bins, so rummaging is necessary to pull out a specific object to fill an order.

"Until now this has been very difficult, so I'm curious to see the new system."

He continued: "The human sense is extremely sensitive and complex, with a huge dynamic range.

"Robots are progressing rapidly but I'd be surprised to see human-equivalent (skin) sensors in the next five-to-ten years."