Amazon's Astro Is a Robot Without a Cause

What do you get when you mix Amazon's Alexa voice assistant with an Echo Show tablet, give it a hefty dose of artificial intelligence, integrate it all with Ring's home security system, and let it roll around your home autonomously? You get a robot for the sake of a robot. Actually, you get Astro, Amazon's long-rumored home robot. The company has been working on this for nearly four years, and it has plans for Astro. It's just not quite sure exactly what those are yet, so it's offering the robot by invitation only, hoping thousands of early customers can help define what it's for.