Amazon
Coventry
During my six-month placement with Amazon's Operations Engineering team, I had the opportunity to work on a project that sat at the intersection of artificial intelligence, industrial hardware, and real-world logistics. My primary focus was designing and deploying an AI-powered camera system to detect waste jams inside one of Amazon's fulfilment centres
During my time as an operations engineer I worked on and install a Waste Jam detection camera to reduce the amount of jams in the Amazon warehouse while also working with managers to improve the Amazon work environment.
The solution centred around an industrial smart camera with built-in machine learning capabilities. Rather than relying on a separate computer to process images, this camera runs its own detection models directly on the device, making it fast and reliable in a factory environment. My role involved training the camera's onboard AI to recognise the visual signatures of waste build-up at key points along the conveyor system. I collected image data from the live environment, labelled examples of normal operation and jam conditions, and iteratively refined the model until it could reliably distinguish between the two. I wrote software that allowed the camera to communicate its findings to programmable logic controllers, the industrial computers that govern conveyor behaviour. When a jam was detected, the system could trigger alerts to maintenance teams or take predefined actions to prevent further disruption. Getting this communication layer right required careful coordination between the camera's software environment and the broader control architecture of the building.
During my time at my placement, I developed my soft skills such as working in a professional engineering team outside of university and in a company. This involved taking advice from engineer and technicians who have a greater understanding of the projects I was working on. Outside of my main project, I was closely involved with managers in understanding the importance of management and the tasks they do on a daily basis, helping improving skills that I struggled with such as people organisation and the work outside of engineering that is done so the techs and engineers can do their work without interference.