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."

Amazon acquired artificial intelligence start-up Orbeus last year, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The tech giant allegedly bought the Californian image recognition firm in autumn 2015, according to a source familiar with the matter. Orbeus's website now greets visitors with a message saying it is no longer taking new customers. The domain name - 'Orb.us' - is also owned by a company subsidiary, Amazon Hostmaster. Its photo recognition technology is based on neural networks, and is available via consumer application PhotoTime.