Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle, and all of America imbued with reading e-books. Four years ago, she released the smart Echo speaker with voice assistant Alexa, and now this speaker is in the homes of ten million people. And now, apparently, the company is preparing for the next stage. She is going to release the first truly intelligent robot that could help people around the house. Moreover, the calculation is that we will be able to see him next year.
The fact that the Internet giant secretly creates its first home robots, Bloomberg found out from employees of the company from San Francisco. Amazon was hired by hiring new workers who are connected with sensors and have experience in robotics. The project has the code name "Vesta" - after the name of the ancient Roman goddess of the hearth. He is led by Greg Zehr, Amazon’s chief developer of all hardware, starting in 2004 with a Kindle reader. Its Lab126 department , numbering 3,000 employees, had previously become known for its clever assistant column Amazon Echo, which captured about 90% of the US market. Now they set themselves an even more ambitious task: to deliver to millions of homes by personal robot.
“Vesta” has been developing for several years, but the general public only became aware of the existence of the project two days ago - when the company began actively hiring new employees in order to have the robot released in 2019. Dozens of offers for engineers and programmers with experience in robotics and sensor design have appeared on the Lab126 job page (some of them have since been deleted). Journalists began to find out what was happening, and found a plan whereby ready-made robots would be sent to the homes of Amazon employees by the end of this year to take part in the final stages of testing.
Greg ZehrIt is unclear how it will look and what exactly the robot will do. People familiar with the project say that, most likely, Alex will have a built-in Alex, a microphone, speakers, and he will be able to move independently through computer vision and advanced cameras to those parts of the house where the Echo and Dot devices are not. He will be able to drive and navigate in space, like a car with an autopilot, and respond to the requests of his master, like any device with Alex. For the computer vision of "Vesta" in Amazon meets the former top Apple manager Max Paley.
Domestic robots that help with daily activities have been on the mind of science fiction writers and engineers for many decades. Nolan Bushnell, the creator of Atari and one of the fathers of the computer games industry, launched the meter meter robot Topo back in 1983. It could be programmed from an Apple II computer so that it moved around the house and “spoke”, but this was where its functions, in fact, ended. At a price equivalent to the current $ 1,250, very few people took it.
Robot TopoThe most famous and popular independent helpers to devices with Alexa were the rumba from iRobot. Their capabilities are also limited, they only know how to vacuum. But even this one function turned out to be so useful and interesting for many users that since 2002 over 20 million points have been purchased. After the news that Amazon was going to develop assistant robots on April 23, iRobot’s shares plunged 10% - the biggest drop in a day since the beginning of February.
LG, Sony and other large companies have recently been developing their AI robots with face recognition technology. Amazon is one of the leaders in the development of artificial intelligence, computer vision (with its supermarkets without cash registers ) and voice control ( with Alexa ), which can make it possible to qualitatively distinguish its robot from its competitors. She is already successfully creating smart robot loaders in her Amazon Robotics department to move goods through her massive warehouses. For this online store in 2012, Kiva Systems bought for $ 775 million. If anyone can make an inexpensive and more or less versatile home robot, it will probably be Amazon.
The head of the online store Jeff Bezos has long been famous for his love of robotics. He recently appeared at the MARS conference on the latest advances in machine learning, space exploration and robotics, with his personal robot robot SpotMini from Boston Dynamics. During the presentation, this robot showed how he can bring beer to the owner and open the door with the help of a roboruki.
Bezos with his SpotMiniPS On Amazon, you can order from Russia. And Pochtoy.com will bring a purchase from the United States. From $ 8.99 per pound. If you register with the code Geektimes, $ 7 comes to the account.