How Amazon is trying to make its robots 'lovable'

The retail giant’s new automatons are designed to avoid upsetting human colleagues, writes Andrew Griffin

- Andrew Griffin

Amazon’s first fully autonomous robot, Proteus, has a lot of responsibilities. Its main job is to pick up trolleys full of parcels and get them where they need to be. But it is also carries a whole other aim: to make robots into something we love.

When Amazon announced last week that it would be launching a new “next-generation” facility in Shreveport, Louisiana, it said that would come with a tenfold increase in the amount of robotics used. That in turn should make it cheaper for Amazon to ship: the company says its new warehouse has already seen the cost of getting a parcel to its destination fall by 25 per cent.

Much of that is down to Proteus, the small green machine shaped like a large Roomba and currently careening around various Amazon facilities. It is notable in part because it is the first robot to escape its confines at Amazon, and work autonomously.

In a blog post published last week, in which Amazon voices the Proteus robot, it said that the “first autonomous mobile robot” title is a “fancy way of saying, I’ve got the smarts and technology that allow me to work independently and safely around people.

“This means that I can navigate freely within my work area in our fulfilment centres and detect and avoid objects around me, allowing me to safely work outside the fenced areas where many of my robotic co-workers must stay.”

Proteus and its wider deployment marks a major breakthrough for Amazon, which is already the largest manufacturer of industrial robotics. But it will also attempt to humanise the robots, to ensure that Amazon workers are happy with them driving around their feet.

That is part of the mission to “make Proteus lovable”, according to Julie Mitchell, a director at Amazon Robotics, who helped bring the machine to life. Making it so was one of the key guiding principles behind the development of the machine, she says.