Amazon is experiencing a special Corona 19 as sales demand increases during the Corona 19 period. On the other hand, accusations have been raised against employees for lack of COVID-19 measures in the workplace. In response, Amazon announced that it has developed a Social Distance Assistant that helps employees maintain appropriate social distancing from others.
In response to the Corona 19 epidemic, blockade measures have been implemented in numerous countries, and demand for online shopping has increased rapidly. Amazon also benefited from this special benefit, but employees working in the field, such as the fulfillment center, which is a logistics base, became dissatisfied with Amazon’s COVID-19 countermeasures, and there were also employee strikes. In addition, in France, Amazon warehouses were temporarily closed in response to a court order to promote the introduction of work restrictions and health-conscious steps.
In the meantime, vice president Brad Porter, who is in charge of the robot business in Amazon, said in a blog that Amazon has developed a system that uses AI to help employees maintain a certain distance. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Amazon engineers began looking for ways to maintain social distancing in order to deliver the products they need to their customers and keep the health and safety of the employees at work. Engineers applied AI and machine learning to building camera images to identify places with a lot of traffic, even within buildings, and implemented a solution to maintain social distance.
Social Distance Assistant is a system that provides feedback on social distance to employees using a large monitor, camera, depth sensor, and offline local computer. A green circle is displayed around the person reflected in the monitor, and if this circle is green, it means that you are maintaining an appropriate social distance from the people around you. The circle size is 1.8m in radius.
Because Amazon’s buildings have so many employees, there are cases in which it is not possible to maintain adequate social distancing in frequent passageways. If an employee is too close, the circle displayed on the monitor turns red and alerts the employee. Monitors are placed in a well-visible area in the building, so employees can check whether they are at a safe distance through the monitor.
All the equipment required for this solution is a standalone unit, so if only power is available, it can be quickly installed at the entrance to a building or in a highly visible place with heavy traffic and alert employees to maintain social distancing.
Social Street Helper has been introduced only in some buildings, and employees can feel the value of getting visual feedback right from the monitor. In line with the positive comments, Amazon is also considering installing hundreds of these devices in weeks and making software and AI open source. In addition to Amazon, there are companies that develop systems that warn of social distancing through AI and camera images, and some of them try to maintain social distancing between employees through Bluetooth. In addition to these measures, there are also privacy experts who are concerned that new technologies are being abused to strengthen employee surveillance in companies. Related information can be found here .