Amazon unveils Astro, a wheeled robot for your home

Speaker 1: Now, let me show you something else we've been working on Astro. Join me on stage Speaker 1: Today. I'm thrilled to introduce you to a new kind of household robot that integrates Alexa, advanced hardware, software, computer vision, and AI in a brand new way. And it's a beautiful illustration of how ambient [00:00:30] computing can improve customers lives in a way that traditional consumer electronics just can't. I've had this robot in my home for about a year, and it does so many delightful things. Let's just start with two that Jamie and Deborah spoke about earlier. Peace of mind and remote care. Even in homes, as electrified as mine, there are still lots of things my home can't do because my devices are stationary. This robot changes all of that with live view and the app, you can send [00:01:00] it to check on specific room things, people even pets. For example, the other day, when I was at work, I was checking to make sure that our dogs weren't lounging on the couch. Speaker 1: They're not allowed to be on. Sure enough. They were on the couch with the Periscope cam. I can also expand my field of view. Technically building this Periscope was incredibly hard, but it so helpful if you're away from home and one, a few things, a little higher up like checking to see if the stove was left on. When [00:01:30] you combine the robot with ring protect pro, you get so much more. Now when you're away, you can use it to proactively patrol your home investigate activity and send you notifications. When it detects something onus all the while you have the option to save these videos to your ring account. As I've had this device in my home, I've started visualizing who in my life could really benefit from it. I have an 85 year old dad who I love dearly and he's in great shape, but he lives 1500 [00:02:00] miles away. Speaker 1: If I could give him a device that helps him live independently and gives me peace of mind, that is truly priceless. Now I can call my dad and it will go find him to deliver the call or my dad can set up a routine that sends me a message when he's up and about. And with Alexa together, if anything goes wrong, I know he can call a specialist 24 by seven. We learned early on in this program that customers don't just want Alexa [00:02:30] on wheels to that end, we've embodied it with a unique persona. That is all it's up from adding eyes to the display to a whole host of sounds. The device really comes alive. Let me give you a quick example, Astro beat box. I just love that one Astro take a break. Speaker 1: [00:03:00] There are so many ways that customers will be using Astro. For instance, it'll bring all of your favorite Alexa features like music and news podcasts and timers directly to you. Or if you're doing a video call, Astro will move around with you in the house so that you can continue the call conversation. Of course, with a new device like this, we had to think about privacy at every term. In addition to the many privacy features that customers are used to with echo devices, [00:03:30] we built brand new features as well. Customers can set out of bound zones to denote areas where they don't want Astra to go. And you can also turn on, do not disturb, which will minimize how much Astro moves during certain times of the day or night. We've also embedded AI processors inside of Astro to allow for as much edge computing as possible. Speaker 1: When we kicked off this project, I felt sure that autonomous navigation in the home was the [00:04:00] solve computer science problem. Four years later, I admit I for one truly underestimated. The challenge everyday life is messy. Floor plans, vary furniture comes in different shapes and sizes. Pets move around and people are constantly setting down sneakers and bags that can block Astros path and unlike roads, your house doesn't have lines or maps that help with navigation. The team had to solve for all of that. Inventing an entirely [00:04:30] new technology construct. One that integrates autonomous movement, home mapping, visual understanding, and more. We had to leverage AI in so many new ways, using deep neural learning to map anchor points throughout the home and building new dynamic slam algorithms that are constantly refreshing. Now, who better to tell you more about this project than the team that knows best. Let's go ahead and roll the video. Speaker 2: [00:05:00] This type of product didn't exist. It was an unrealized vision Speaker 3: For many years. I was really excited to be able to work on something that was so complex and so sort of new within Amazon, as well as new to world, Speaker 2: It's taking science fiction and making it to the other. And one of the senior management meetings we talked about, does anybody in the room think that in five, 10 years, [00:05:30] you're not gonna have robots in your home. And everybody's like, yeah, we are. So we said, well, let's get started. Speaker 3: So that's when we really started to get into a lot of the fun experiences around sort of inventing, um, what the customer experience should be for a feature that was just a line on a piece of paper paper. Prior to that, Speaker 4: We've pulled together technologies from all these different areas to build something that so many roboticists have been dreaming about or thinking about the question wasn't should rebuild it, but why wouldn't we, Speaker 5: No Astro can see infer [00:06:00] here on this stand, but then you add mobility on Speaker 6: Top of it. Astro is a robot that can go up to a meter per second. It has to detect walls. It has to detect challenging situations. This is gonna Speaker 2: Be an autonomous device that's driving around your home. We had to make sure that there was a system that was always looking out and can stop Astro in a moment's notice. Speaker 7: Slam is simultaneous localization Speaker 6: And mapping. This is a standard term used in robotics. It's an old problem. It's not a new problem. The complexity [00:06:30] is immense. It's well Speaker 8: Known in the slam community that people will also say we solved the math 20 years ago. We still haven't figured out how to do it. And this is a great example of how you've actually taken the math and deliver a truly impressive system. Speaker 6: The robot has these cameras and it'll look around and it'll find points. And it's able to see if it recognizes where it is in this cloud of points and space. Astro is doing millions and millions of calculations. [00:07:00] Every second, we have multiple neural networks running in parallel based on camera input. We have multiple planners in this thing, figuring out what to do and how to tie it all together. And kind of the neat thing about it is it's all packaged up within one robot. Speaker 7: Astro does slam really well to be able to do locally do it so fast map out the, the world so quickly. I'm, Speaker 5: I'm really impressed navigating autonomously and, um, you know, building a map of its own. I mean, that is Speaker 2: Incredible. We took inspiration [00:07:30] from science fiction and movies and cartoons, places where people have looked into the future and thought about what could it look like to have something in the home to help you? We wanted Speaker 9: To create a person out of the top 100 robots that people love. Only five of them didn't have eyes. It's Speaker 3: Effectively this universal symbol for communication. And we were able to communicate a lot of things that we otherwise wouldn't necessarily have been able to. Also, we got to really think about, you know, what should a robot sound like? Phon names and motifs, you know, creating Speaker 9: [00:08:00] Cords. Most consumer electronic devices are just nuts and bolts. You turn it on. It plays a sound, that's it. Astro comes to life. This is our first Speaker 6: Robot, not our last Speaker 5: Robot. I think I'm excited to be able to launch Astra and share this with my friends and family and point to Astra and say, this is what Speaker 6: I worked on. It's unlike anything ever, ever done before. And the technology that we have built, I look at as foundational, oh, Speaker 8: Astro's a huge step forward. The next question will be, when should I get [00:08:30] one? Speaker 1: I am so proud of all the hard problems that the team solved to make Astro reality. Astro's part of our day one editions program, which is designed to bring our most ambitious ideas to life. Astro will be available for an introductory price of $999. Starting today. You can sign up to request an invite and we plan to start granting invitations and shipping the device a little later this year, Astro already does [00:09:00] so much, and we've just shown you the tip of the iceberg like Alexa, which has continued to get smarter. Since we launched seven years ago, Astro two will get smarter and more capable over time.