Soon we might see sidewalks filled with little robots scurrying around and no, this isn’t a scene from Star Wars where the likes of R2D2 are roaming corridors and pathways. Instead, the rise of autonomous robots will come into play as corporations find sustainable and cost-effective methods to solve the age-old task, delivery. Enter Amazon Scout.
Amazon touted their Amazon Prime Drone delivery via air but that solution wasn’t effective when people don’t have lawns for the drones to land. Hence Amazon is testing out another style of delivery, via robots that run along the sidewalks. Well, if your answer is that Malaysia has no sidewalks, that is definitely a problem for the robot to solve as well.
Starting with a small neighbourhood in Washington, Seattle, Amazon hopes to be able to learn from their testing before rolling it out to other locations. The robot is pretty small, about the size of a cooler and moves at a walking pace speed. Initially, the robots will be accompanied by an Amazon employee but the company hopes that as testing progresses, human supervision can be cut. The robot is targeted to run from Monday to Fridays during the day as a start.
In the video above you can see that its speed is nothing fantastic, so having it in the cities or crossing the roads may be a challenge. The mechanics and procedure of autonomous robots at the start may seem daunting but if the likes of Amazon can create the Go stores, this would be one issue I am confident that they can solve using the Amazon Scout.
