Amazon has developed a new warehouse robot that uses touch to rummage around shelves to find the right product to ship to customers. The robot, called Vulcan, is a meaningful step toward making robots less sausage-fingered compared to human beings. Aaron Parness, Amazon’s director of robotics AI who led the development of Vulcan, explains that touch sensing helps the robot push items around on a shelf and identify what it’s after. Vulcan has sensors on several of its joints that allow the robot to detect the edges and contours of items. Items that the robot decides it cannot find will be reassigned to human workers.