Can Amazon Build a Home Robot That Is Useful and Affordable?

Yesterday, Bloomberg broke a story that Amazon's Lab126 research and development group in San Francisco has been working on some kind of mobile home robot. It's not a huge surprise to see Amazon throwing its R&D budget at more robots, and a home robot is a perfectly logical thing for them to take a crack at. The question is, what kind of robot is Amazon building, and what will it be able to do? While we're obviously hoping for an affordable, useful robot, it won't be easy, and Amazon will have a lot of work to do to make something successful. We should point out up front that at this point the amount of tangible information here is quite limited. Now, what kind of domestic mobile robot might Amazon want to make? "People familiar with the project speculate that the Vesta robot could be a sort of mobile Alexa, accompanying customers in parts of their home where they don't have Echo devices."