Amazon Has a Top-Secret Plan to Build Home Robots
Amazon Has a Top-Secret Plan to Build Home Robots
Prototypes can navigate from room to room like driverless
cars
Company hopes to start testing bots in homes later this
year
By Mark Gurman and Brad Stone April 23, 2018, 4:00 AM PDT
Updated on April 23, 2018, 8:22 AM PDT
Bloomberg’s Gerritt DeVynck reports on how Amazon may be
trying to build a robot for the home.
Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and
established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff
Bezos and company rolled out the Echo, prompting millions of people to start
talking to a computer.
Now Amazon.com Inc. is working on another big bet: robots
for the home.
The retail and cloud computing giant has embarked on an
ambitious, top-secret plan to build a domestic robot, according to people
familiar with the plans. Codenamed “Vesta,” after the Roman goddess of the
hearth, home and family, the project is overseen by Gregg Zehr, who runs
Amazon’s Lab126 hardware research and development division based in Sunnyvale,
California. Lab126 is responsible for Amazon devices such as the Echo speakers,
Fire TV set-top-boxes, Fire tablets and the ill-fated Fire Phone.
The Vesta project originated a few years ago, but this
year Amazon began to aggressively ramp up hiring. There are dozens of listings
on the Lab 126 Jobs page for openings like “Software Engineer, Robotics” and
“Principle Sensors Engineer.” People briefed on the plan say the company hopes
to begin seeding the robots in employees’ homes by the end of this year, and
potentially with consumers as early as 2019, though the timeline could change,
and Amazon hardware projects are sometimes killed during gestation.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company doesn’t comment
on “rumors and speculation.”
It’s unclear what tasks an Amazon robot might perform.
People familiar with the project speculate that the Vesta robot could be a sort
of mobile Alexa, accompanying customers in parts of their home where they don’t
have Echo devices. Prototypes of the robots have advanced cameras and computer
vision software and can navigate through homes like a self-driving car. Former
Apple executive Max Paley is leading the work on computer vision. Amazon has
also hired specialized mechanical engineers from the robotics industry.
The project is different than the robots designed by
Amazon Robotics, a company subsidiary, in Massachusetts and Germany, people
familiar with the project say. Amazon Robotics deploys robots in Amazon
warehouses to move around goods and originated as a company called Kiva
Systems, which Amazon acquired in 2012 for $775 million.
The promise of domestic robots that offer companionship
or perform basic chores has tantalized the technology industry for decades.
Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, introduced the three-foot-tall,
snowman-shaped Topo Robot back in 1983. Though it could be programmed to move
around by an Apple II computer, it did little else and sold poorly. Subsequent
attempts to produce useful robotic servants in the U.S., Japan and China over
the years have performed only marginally better. iRobot Corp.’s Roomba, which
only does one thing -- vacuum -- is the standout in the field and has sold more
than 20 million units since 2002. The company’s shares fell as much as 8.6
percent on Monday, the biggest intraday decline since early February.
More recently, Sony Corp. and LG Electronics Inc. have
shown interest in the category. In January at CES, LG showed off a robot called
Cloi in a demonstration that failed multiple times. Sony demonstrated a new
version of a robotic dog called Aibo, which it sold a version of until the
mid-2000s after first unveiling the concept about 20 years ago. It doesn’t do
much other than bark (although Aibo has been programmed to play soccer). The
canine bot also costs $1,800, or about the same price as a real dog from a
breeder.
Advances in computer vision technology, cameras,
artificial intelligence and voice activation help make it feasible for Amazon
to bring its robot to the marketplace. The retail giant has shown itself
willing to partially subsidize the costs of its devices for Prime subscribers
who buy more products and subscribe to services through its gadgets. That could
also make such a product more affordable for mainstream consumers in the
future.
For more on Amazon, check out the Decrypted podcast:
The consumer robot market will be worth about $15 billion
a year by 2023, according to an estimate from Research and Markets, which would
be up from about $5.4 billion this year.
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