Amazon has formed a new team over the past few months to develop a "new-to-world" home robot product, according to CNBC's analysis of the company's job postings. A recent Amazon job ad for an engineer said: "Robots are about to come out of the movies and into our homes." The posting, which has since been taken down, said the new product can adapt to changing home environments and move autonomously around human family members. CNBC reported that Amazon is hiring for roles tied to a "new-to-world robot product."
New team and hiring details
LinkedIn profiles show that earlier this year Amazon moved most members of the Astro project to other roles and hired a robotics expert from MIT to work on home robot development. There is still no clear word on what kind of home robot the new team intends to build or what tasks it would perform.
A June job posting, however, said the goal is not only to make the robot useful but also to make users enjoy using it.
Astro's cautionary tale
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos asked executives in the company's devices business to start work on a home robot in 2017. In the fall of 2021, Amazon unveiled Astro, a $1,450 home robot that can move around on its own, recognize faces and patrol the home for security.
But Astro was never sold broadly to the public — it was available by invitation only — and ultimately reached just a few thousand customers. Some users concluded that Astro might be on its way out. Amazon also launched a commercial version of Astro in 2023 but ended that business in less than a year.
Despite Astro's disappointing run, Amazon has not given up on Bezos's vision of a home robot. CEO Andy Jassy reaffirmed the long-term bet in his latest annual shareholder letter, saying AI and robotics will bring about one of the biggest changes in people's lifetimes.
"We work to anticipate what will make customers' lives easier and better every day, and to create the next major inflection point."
Amazon has long been willing to bet on long-term projects even when outsiders do not understand them in the short term, as long as they can help the company seize an early edge in new markets. The Alexa voice assistant and the Kindle e-reader both followed that playbook.
What to watch
The new team has not disclosed the product's form, feature set or launch timing. The restart, which involves an MIT robotics expert, is seen as an important test case for how big tech companies place long-term bets on embodied intelligence. The industry is watching whether Amazon can learn from Astro's mistakes and strike a balance between usefulness and user delight, so that home robots can truly reach the mass market.