Amazon Is Reportedly Working On Its First Home Robot
Amazon is moving one more step ahead in building tech products for homes, with an ambitious plan to design and build a line of robots codenamed "Vesta." These robots are, for now, expected to be a more mobile platform for Alexa that can navigate homes independently.
It's a top-secret plan from the company that brought the Echo to homes everywhere, and details are scant for now. From the little that is known about the project, the team in charge is Amazon's internal Lab126 hardware research and development division, as Bloomberg reported.
Lab126, based in Sunnyvale, California, is also the birthplace of the Amazon Echo speaker and Fire TV set-top devices. All Amazon Fire-branded products were also developed by the same division.
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To pull off this ambitious engineering feat, engineers are needed, of course. Amazon has been hiring them in droves, with a long list of openings for Lab 126 for jobs like "Principle Sensors Engineer" to "Robotics Software Engineer," hinting that Amazon is really seriously considering adding robots and drones to their line of products.
As expected, Amazon would not give out more than their assurance that they would not comment on "rumors and speculation," as a company spokesperson called these reports.
The "Vesta" project is likely named after the Roman goddess of home and the hearth, as a continuation of Amazon's running theme of developing family-oriented devices for domestic use. While the uses for a domestic robot is, at least for now, of limited use, early prototypes are expected to at least be capable of self-navigation, as The Verge noted.
Early Vesta models are expected to be more like self-driving cars that follow users indoors, acting similar to a mobile platform for the Alexa voice-activated digital assistant. The very first prototypes built by Amazon reportedly come with computer vision software and cameras that help them move about.
Amazon is also said to be planning to pilot test these robots in the homes of their employees by the end of the year. As for those not so closely associated with the company, they may be able to try out the very first robot models released to the general public "as early as 2019," according to reports.
At first, an Alexa home speaker that follows the family around may be more of a novelty than a practical device, but the CEO of iRobot, the maker of the Roomba robot cleaner, already had a few ideas on how Amazon can make better use of the navigation information that these robots will be able to collect.
In the near future, commands like "turn off the lights in the living room" will make sense to a home robot that knows where the switches are, and how to get there on its own.
