Amid Amazon's Robot Surge, Proteus Charts a New Path Forward
The robots glide across the floor, sometimes pausing to spin a quarter turn or two before resuming their route. They come close to one another but never collide. It's not choreographed – they're adapting on the fly – but the movement does have the feel of a ballet.
If ballet dancers were mechanized platforms on wheels, that is. Flat-topped and low to the ground, like oversized bathroom scales granted the gift of movement and the ability to navigate on their own.
These are Amazon's Proteus robots in action.
In a spacious Amazon warehouse in London, as in its counterparts around the world, Proteus, Titan and fellow robots are perpetually tasked with fetch quests – finding and retrieving shelving units that contain items that all of us order day in and day out and bringing them to stations where those items are picked, packed and sent on their way.
Some of...
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