Amazon is reportedly planning to launch domestic robots. Assuming the robot designs aren’t horrendous, Amazon already has the computer vision, deep learning and speech processing to make its robots helpful.
Amazon is reportedly plotting to launch a series of home robots and although it’s unclear what these domestic helpers would do the one certainty is that the company already has the software stack in place to make the project a success.
Bloomberg is reporting that Amazon’s Lab126, which incubates new products and services, is working on a domestic robot codenamed Vesta. The Vesta robot effort is different than the Amazon robotics business formed via the 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems. The Kiva deal helped Amazon automate its fulfillment centers.
Domestic robots for Amazon aren’t that much of a leap. If anything, all Amazon is doing is giving Alexa a body. These helpers could do chores–think iRobot–or simply be companions. There are also multiple extensions into health care, enterprise collaboration and naturally e-commerce.
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Amazon’s domestic robot efforts are likely to succeed largely because the company has shown it can do the following:
In fact, that latter point will determine whether Amazon’s domestic robots work out in the long run. With that in mind, here’s a quick scan of what Amazon already has as a robot stack of software. Hardware is really the only wild card in the equation. Consider the following robotic brain processing parts already available:
What’s interesting here is that most domestic robot players would build the hardware and then likely struggle with efforts to add an ecosystem, cloud processing and things like computer vision and machine learning. AWS is working from the stack back to the front end hardware. All things considered domestic robots from Amazon should be an easy layup assuming it can nail the hardware design. And given Amazon has done well with its Echo line and Fire tablets there’s no reason to think that its domestic robots will be too homely for consideration.
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