Amazon Scout Delivery Robots Expand

Been awaiting for this, looking forward to see it operational in the suburbs, on the roads and sidewalks, among people.  My camera is ready.

Amazon is testing its Scout delivery robots in Georgia and Tennessee
It’s already testing the bots in Washington and California.
Christine Fisher, @cfisherwrites in Engadget

If you live in Atlanta, Georgia or Franklin, Tennessee, your next Amazon order might arrive in one of the company’s Scout delivery robots. Amazon began testing its cooler-sized delivery bots in Snohomish County, Washington last year. They’ve been making deliveries in the Irvine area of California, and this week they popped up in Atlanta and Franklin.

Only a handful of Amazon Scout devices will operate in each city. They’ll be accompanied by a human, travel at walking speed and make deliveries Monday through Friday, during daylight hours. Customers will place their Amazon orders as usual, and there won’t be any additional cost for Scout deliveries.

Scout has successfully navigated around objects on the sidewalk -- from dogs to refrigerators left for pickup and surfboards. We still don’t know how it will verify who is opening its storage hatch or how it will unload packages if no one is there to collect them. For now, its human assistant will take care of that.  .. " 

Amazon Clones a Neigborhood

Look at how Amazon tests difficult scenarios real-life scenarios for delivery.  Have a real space you can manipulate and easily include behaviorally difficult elements, like humans, to understand  design issues.

How Amazon Cloned a Neighborhood to Test Its Delivery Robots  By Tom Simonite in Wired

  In March Matt Bratlien saw something odd in the spacious suburb of Silver Firs, north of Seattle. A six-wheeled robot with the Amazon Prime logo on its sky-blue carapace was driving up and down the sidewalks and curbs, watched by a company representative. “I was surprised, excited, and very curious,” says Bratlien, a partner at Net-Tech, an IT services company in nearby Bellevue.

Bratlien had encountered Scout, a delivery robot Amazon is testing in the area, including by ferrying real orders to customers. Here’s what he didn’t see: Countless digital clones crawling through a virtual copy of the neighborhood that Amazon created with scans of the area collected by lasers, cameras, and aircraft.

Amazon knows a lot about the world thanks to data from its vast retail business and cloud computing platform. It knows a 2-square-kilometer zone of Snohomish County in unusual detail—down to the position of weeds sprouting through the drainage grates. The company’s digital copy mirrors the position of curbstones and driveways within centimeters, and textures like the grain of asphalt within millimeters. .... "

Amazon Scout Robot will Crawl Sidewalks

And if you can't fly a package in on a drone, you can crawl along the sidewalk to make delivery with a robot that looks like a picnic ice chest.  Amazon is trying them all.   Will they need clearance?  Good details at the link.

How Amazon’s delivery robots will navigate your sidewalk
Frederic Lardinois@fredericl  in TechCrunch

Earlier this year, Amazon  announced its Scout sidewalk delivery robot. At the time, details were sparse, except for the fact that the company had started to make deliveries in a neighborhood in Washington State. Today, at Amazon’s re:Mars conference, I sat down with Sean Scott, the VP in charge of Scout, to talk about how his team built the robot, how it finds its way around and what its future looks like.

These relatively small blue robots could be roaming a sidewalk near you soon, though as of now, Amazon isn’t quite ready to talk about when and where it will expand its network from its single neighborhood to other areas..... "

Nuro Moves Forward

This is the company Kroger is working with to pilot autonomous delivery.    Following closely.

Autonomous delivery startup Nuro picks up $940M from SoftBank   By Maria Deutscher in SiliconAngle

For a market that didn’t exist a couple years ago, the nascent autonomous delivery market is certainly drawing a lot of investor interest.

Nuro Inc., a startup looking to use self-driving vehicles to pick up groceries for consumers, today announced that it has closed a staggering $940 million investment from SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund. The round reportedly gives it a valuation of $2.7 billion. It has raised a total of more than $1 billion from SoftBank, Greylock Partners and Gaorong Capital.

Mountain View, California-based Nuro was founded in 2016 by Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, two veterans of Google LLC parent Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving car initiative. They worked on the project as principal engineers before the search giant spun it off into an independent business unit. Aurora Innovation inc., an autonomous driving startup led by another veteran of Alphabet’s self-driving car initiative, last week raised a $530 million funding round of its own.

In contrast with Aurora, which is taking a somewhat secretive approach with its efforts, Nuro hasn’t shied away from the industry spotlight. The startup made headlines last year when it announced a partnership with Kroger Co. to pilot an autonomous delivery service in Scottsdale, Arizona. After initially using Toyota Prius hybrids to ferry groceries to buyers, Nuro expanded the fleet in December with an internally developed robot dubbed the R1.

It’s about half the size of a car and has two storage compartments with space for three shopping bags each. This makes the vehicle larger than most of the other delivery robots on the market, including Amazon.com’s recently unveiled Scout rover.  ... " 

Amazon Prime Tests Rolling Delivery

Sidewalk drones they are calling them in this test.   Will they survive suburbia?

Amazon begins testing deliveries with sidewalk drones
Robots are "the size of a small cooler and roll along at a walking pace."
By Timothy B. Lee  in ArsTechnica

Amazon said on Wednesday that it will start delivering packages using a six-wheeled sidewalk robot called Amazon Scout.

"Starting today, these devices will begin delivering packages to customers in a neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington," the company's announcement says—that's just north of Seattle. Amazon says that its robots "are the size of a small cooler and roll along sidewalks at a walking pace."... ' 

On Amazon Scout for Product Discovery

Did lots of work with systems that would search for items in stores.    Here the next step.   Is this search in a virtual space?   And what other kinds of curation of the search is also at play?

Is Amazon on the right path to improved product discovery with Scout?
by Ken Lonyai in Retailwire

Jeff Bezos has said, “To invent you have to experiment and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.” By that definition, Amazon Scout is an enormous experiment. 

Scout (amazon.com/scout) is a new visual search engine within Amazon. It’s aimed at categories where visual appeal is a big part of shoppers’ selection criteria, so furniture, women’s shoes and lighting are early subjects. Shoppers choose a product subcategory and then give a thumbs up or down to each image. It seems like a simple and intuitive method of culling preferred items from a list of possibilities, but without a rework, I believe it will be a failed experiment. 

The system utilizes machine learning to make replacements to the displayed assortment based on similarities or contrasts to the user-ranked item. The more rankings, the more tuned the selection until, in theory, the product choices displayed are largely purchase candidate items that meet the shopper’s desires. .... "