In a post looking back over the past 10 years since it purchased robotics company Kiva, Amazon has revealed its new machines, including its first fully autonomous warehouse robot. It's called Proteus, and it was designed to be able to move around Amazon's facilities on its own while carrying carts fulls of packages. The company said the robot uses an "advanced safety, perception and navigation technology" it developed to be able to do its work without hindering human employees. In the video Amazon posted, you can see Proteus moving under the carts and transporting them to other locations. It emits a green beam ahead of it while it moves, and it stops if a human worker steps in front of the beam.

Locus' autonomous warehouse robots just got a whole lot smarter, thanks to a new software update that allows them to talk to each other. Anyone who has ever worked as part of a team (which, in today's hyperconnected world, is virtually everyone) will know that things work better when people talk with one another. This way knowledge gets shared, collaborations become possible, and individual successes or mistakes are collectively learned from. Why would you think that things would be any different in the world of robotics? That's exactly what the folks at Locus Robotics have been proving with a major new software update for their factory robot LocusBots. LocusBots are autonomous warehouse robots, capable of moving autonomously through a space and then transporting items from where they're picked off shelves to the place they're packaged into boxes and shipped out.