Amazon is reportedly planning 'Vesta' home robot for 2019

Amazon's next major consumer product could be far more ambitious than Echo speakers and Fire tablets, according to a new Bloomberg report: The company is said to be working on a domestic robot codenamed "Vesta" after the Roman goddess of family, hearth, and home. Vesta is said to be several years into development, with a release targeted for sometime next year. According to the report, while Vesta's exact purpose is not yet fully known, signs point to it acting as a mobile AI assistant, providing aid by accompanying users to places in their homes that don't have Alexa devices. Vesta prototypes can apparently navigate through homes using autonomous car technologies such as cameras and computer vision, though the robots' sizes and locomotion systems are not specified. Amazon's Lab126 consumer hardware R&D division has hired robotics industry mechanical engineers to aid in the project and is still hiring sensor engineers and robotics software engineers.