Last October, Amazon made a big splash with the launch of its Blue Jay program—a new multi-armed robot described as the next-generation system for sorting and moving packages. Now, after just a few months, the project is being shut down due to high manufacturing costs, technical complexity, and integration challenges.
According to sources familiar with the matter, the project was shut down in January after just a few months, Business Insider reports. When Amazon unveiled the project in October, Blue Jay was described as a ”core technology” for enabling same-day delivery at a reduced cost. The robot was developed extremely quickly—in just twelve months—with the support of AI to accelerate training and deployment. Amazon spokesperson Terrence Clark told Business Insider that Blue Jay’s core technology will be transferred to other initiatives within the company’s extensive warehouse network.
“We’re always experimenting with new ways to improve the customer experience and make work safer, more efficient, and more engaging for our employees,” Clark said in a statement.
Blue Jay was equipped with multiple robotic arms capable of reaching and lifting several objects at once—a design intended to increase productivity while creating a safer environment for warehouse staff. Amazon’s Terrence Clark told TechCrunch that Blue Jay’s technology will now be used for other robotics-related applications focused on picking, moving, and interacting.
“We’re always experimenting with new ways to improve the customer experience and make work safer, more efficient, and more engaging for our employees. In this case, we’re actually accelerating the adoption of the underlying technology developed for Blue Jay,” he says.
Amazon also unveiled the Vulcan robot last year, which is used in the storage bins at the company’s warehouses. Vulcan is a two-armed robot, with one arm designed to reorganize and move items within a bin while the other is equipped with a camera and suction cups to grasp goods. Vulcan is said to be able to ”sense” the objects it touches and was trained using data collected from real-world interactions.
Since Amazon acquired the robotics company Kiva Systems in 2012, a wide variety of warehouse robots have been developed. By 2025, Amazon had 1 million robots installed in its warehouses, meaning that the number of robots will soon exceed the number of people working in the e-commerce and tech giant’s warehouses. According to the Wall Street Journal, 75 percent of Amazon’s global deliveries are handled in some way by a robot.
