In order to improve delivery times and modernize its distribution centers, Amazon announced that it is working to eliminate barcodes to replace them with artificial intelligence.

The current system is essential to the company’s organizational processes, but they want to stop depending on it because scanning products requires an employee, as a machine cannot do this when manipulating articles.

To solve this, a new way of working is the so-called Multimodal Identification (MMID) which receives data such as dimensions, visual characteristics, packaging text or weight to automate product recognition.

“Solving this problem so that robots can pick up items and process them without looking for and scanning a barcode is critical. This will help us deliver packages to customers faster and more accurately. And MMID is the cornerstone to achieving that,” he said. of Nontas AntonakoOne of the project managers.

You may be interested in:

To identify AI products

This new system initially works with cameras to pick up product references and create a sort of fingerprint for researchers to translate into vector images.

In addition, an automatic learning model was built for the system to take this reference and comparison, which according to the company, the comparison was 70 to 80% successful the first time it was implemented, but after constant training MMID Achieved 99% accuracy.

For its correct operation, the system needs several factors, such as the high quality of the photos to store in the database, the speed with which the conveyor belt passes through which the products to be analyzed pass, and that no employee interferes with the manipulation of the object. As this will affect the performance of the scan, it opens up the possibility of failure.

Additionally, the AI ​​knows where each item comes from, so it doesn’t need to compare it to the millions of products it processes. Amazon continuously, but the range is reduced so that the goal of improving delivery times can be achieved.

You may be interested in:

The first testing of the system was carried out in St Poland With a camera placed on an individual conveyor that moves only one item, which allowed the AI ​​to be tested to the extreme and also not affect the rest of the operation, once a failure was detected the system would issue an alert and it would be fixed, but without the alert there were other cases to address.

The company still has a long way to go to embed this technology firmly into its distribution process, engineers are working to integrate it with robotic arms, reducing the need for staff, but they must address other issues to ensure product identification, intervention. Speed, by the way.

“This view, about use MMID During the compliance process, robotic automation should be accelerated and enabled. And when this is achieved, it will be another step forward in our journey to get packages to customers with greater speed and accuracy,” he said. Antonakos.

Continue reading: