Technology giant Amazon announced today that they have developed an artificial intelligence-based system for workers working in their warehouses to maintain social distance.. Amazon also announced that they will distribute the plans and underlying technology of this system, which is defined as “Distance Assistant”, for free .

The company, which was exposed to much criticism due to its working conditions during the pandemic, with this move, managed to get rid of the burdens. Amazon announces Distance Assistant technology includes 50-inch monitor, camera and laptop. Camera shows how close people are walking to each other. It creates a circle around people thanks to the Augmented Reality it uses.. When the circle is first formed, it turns green, but if the people caught by the camera are closer than 1.8 meters, the circles intersect and turn red.. Although it has a very simple system, it seems to work very well.

Social distance assistant prototypes started to be used as soon as they passed the tests.. The app is currently available in a small number of Amazon buildings, but the company aims to expand the system to all its buildings as soon as possible.

Amazon: “Distance Assistant Will Be Open Source“

With this study, Amazon showed that it cares about the health and safety of its employees.. The company also stated that this technology will be useful to other companies, and for this reason, it will share the source codes of Distance Assistant as open source.. In this way, other companies will not have to pay any fees to Amazon for such distance assistant projects.

It Was the Target of Criticism

Although the new system, Amazon’s Although it increased the security in the working areas of the company, the company received a lot of criticism from its employees and other people for not taking enough precautions against the Coronavirus.. Some employees of the company said that the managers in the department gave false information.. According to the statement made by the employees, the managers were fraudulently filling out the reports on social distancing on purpose, even though the rules were not followed properly.. Employees have also sued Amazon, but thanks to the distance assistant, it seems to have taken a step towards eliminating these inadequacies.. Since the image cannot be easily tampered with, it will be more difficult for Amazon to commit such frauds.

Although we trust Amazon to launch this project in good faith, some people have claimed that this will gain the company more people-tracking capabilities.. For this reason, it was requested to allow the use of the software only during the pandemic period.