For Amazon’s latest hardware trick, the company has
apparently been working on a home robot under the codename, “Vesta.” That
nugget comes via Bloomberg sources, who report that the online retail giant
expects to start trialing the device in employee homes this year, with plans to
launch it to consumers as early as 2019.
The project has apparently been in the works for a number of
years, but things are finally starting to take off, as the company lists
openings for a number of gigs in and around robotics, with titles like
“Software Engineer, Robotics.” No word on precisely what such a robot would do,
and Amazon, naturally, isn’t commenting.
The home market has been a tough one for the robotics
industry to crack — a feat not really accomplished by any devices, beyond the
Roomba and derivative cleaning robots. A number of assistant robots have
bubbled up over the years, essentially adding moving parts to a smart speaker
category. Certainly Alexa functionality is a given for whatever Amazon might be
working on — even the Roomba has added that feature in the last year.
Other companies, like Sphero spin-off Misty Robotics, are
hoping to bring more advanced functionality to the market, though they’ve given
themselves what equates to a 10-year runway. But while the industry appears
bullish about the future of robots in the home, it may well take a tech giant
like Amazon to really crack the code, as it did a few years back with the Echo.
Jeff Bezos, of course, is a well-known friend to robots.
He’s been seen around town with the likes of spotmini recently, and before
that, the company acquired Kiva Systems to form Amazon Robotics. That
department, however, has been primarily focused on fulling Amazon’s own
shipping and logistics requirements with industrial warehouse robots.
Vesta, on the other hand, is said to be the product of
Lab126 — the Amazon R&D center that gave the world the Echo and a bevy of
Fire devices.
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