Amazon is shutting down its Blue Jay robotics project after less than six months

Amazon has hundreds of thousands of robots in its warehouses, but that doesn’t mean all of its robotic initiatives are a success story.

The e-commerce giant has halted its Blue Jay warehouse robotics project just months after unveiling the technology, as originally reported by Business Insider and confirmed by TechCrunch.

Blue Jay, a multi-armed robot designed to sort and move packages, was unveiled in October for use in the company’s same-day delivery facilities. At the time, the company was testing the robots at a facility in South Carolina, and said it took Amazon much less time to develop Blue Jay — only about a year — than it did to develop other warehouse robots, a speed the company attributed to advances in artificial intelligence.

Amazon spokesperson Terrance Clark told TechCrunch that the Blue Jay was launched as a prototype — though that wasn’t made clear in the company’s original press release.

The company plans to use Blue Jay’s core technology in other robot “gaming software” while moving employees who worked on Blue Jay to other projects.

“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 told TechCrunch via email. “In this case, we are actually accelerating the use of the core technology developed for Blue Jay, almost all of the technology is transitioning and we will continue to support employees across our network.”

Last year, Amazon also unveiled the Vulcan robot, which is used in storage rooms in the company’s warehouses. Vulcan is a robot with two arms, one arm dedicated to rearranging and moving items in the compartment while the other is equipped with a camera and suction cups to pick up goods. Vulcans can allegedly “feel” things they touch, and have been trained on data collected from real-world interactions.

Amazon has been developing its own internal robotics program since 2012 when it bought Kiva Systems, the robotics company whose warehouse automation technology formed the foundation of Amazon’s fulfillment operations. The number of robots in its warehouses exceeded one million last July.