Amazon will present tools to monitor factory workers and machines

Amazon is rolling out new economic tools that will allow factories around the world to track their workers and machines as the tech giant seeks to increase its presence in the industrial sector.

Launched from the cloud arm of Amazon AWS, the new machine learning-based services include hardware to monitor the health of heavy machinery and machine vision that can detect whether workers respect social distances.

Amazon said it has created a low-cost two-inch sensor, Monitron, which can be connected to equipment to monitor abnormal vibrations or temperatures and predict future failures.

AWS Panorama, meanwhile, is a service that uses computer vision to analyze footage collected by cameras within facilities, automatically detecting safety and compliance issues such as workers not wearing PPE or vehicles being driven into unauthorized areas.

The new services, announced Tuesday at the company’s annual cloud computing conference, represent a step forward in the tech giant’s efforts to collect and analyze real-world data in areas it currently believes is insufficient.

“If you look at manufacturing and industry in general, it’s a space that has seen some innovations, but there are a lot of pieces that haven’t been digitized and modernized,” AWS Head of Sales and Marketing Matt Garman told FT. .

“Stuck in the machines”

“There is a lot of data in a factory, manufacturing facility or supply chain. It’s just locked up in sensors, locked up in machines that many companies could get a lot of value from. “

Amazon said it has installed 1,000 Monitron sensors in its fulfillment centers near the German city of Mönchengladbach, where they are used to monitor the conveyor belts handling packages.

If successful, Jefferies analyst Brent Thill said, the move would help Amazon solidify its position as a dominant cloud computing player, in the face of growing competition from Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, as well as a long string of slowed growth of the segment.

“This idea of ​​predictive analytics can go beyond a factory,” Thill said. “It can get into a car, on a bridge or on an oil rig. It can cross fertilize many different sectors. “

Several companies are already experimenting with AWS Panorama. Siemens Mobility said it will use the technology to monitor traffic flow in cities, although it did not specify which one. Deloitte said it is working with a major North American port to use the tool to track the movement of shipments.

“It’s easy for us to worry”

However, Amazon’s use of tools to monitor employee productivity has raised concerns among critics. During the pandemic, the company used computer vision to ensure employee compliance with social distancing guidelines.

Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS Head of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, said none of the announced services will include “off-the-shelf” facial recognition capabilities and said AWS will block customers who abuse its privacy and privacy terms of service. data surveillance.

“When we look at this technology, it is sometimes very easy for us to worry about how it can be abused,” he told the FT.

“But the same technology can be used to ensure worker safety. Do people walk into spaces where they shouldn’t be? Is there an oil spill? Don’t they wear helmets? These are real world problems. “

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