Why Amazon built a home robot – TechCrunch

Robots are hard, and in a lot of ways home robots are doubly so. That no one has managed to crack the code beyond the wild success of robotic vacuums like the Roomba is not for lack of trying. To date, it's largely been the realm of startups like Anki and Jibo (or the rare exception of the Bosch-created Kuri), but today, Amazon announced that it's throwing its own tremendous resources behind the problem. The company just announced its first robot, Astro. The product is taking its first baby steps to market as part of Amazon's Day One Edition program.