United Kingdom, May 7 -- Amazon has made a robot with a sense of touch.

The warehouse robot, called Vulcan, will use touch to rummage around shelves and find the right product to ship to customers.

The bot is a key step in making robots as tactile as humans and the development could allow them to take on more manufacturing work in the years to come.

Aaron Parness, Amazon's director of robotics AI who has led the development of Vulcan, explained that touch helps the cyborg push items along a shelf before deciding what it wants.

He said: "When you're trying to stow (or pick) items in one of these pods, you can't really do that task without making contact with the other items."

The Vulcan system features a conventional robotic arm with ...