Amazon’s Scout delivery robot starts shuttling around the United States

Amazon's Scout delivery robot is now slowly shuttling around four areas in the United States: Washington, California, Atlanta, and Georgia. The electrically powered, cooler-sized delivery system is designed to find its way along sidewalks and navigate around pets, people, and a wide variety of other things it encounters while delivering packages to customers' homes. To deploy a fleet of fully autonomous delivery robots, Scout is bringing in variations in terrain, unexpected obstacles, a nearly infinite range of variables.

To better understand how Amazon Scout is working to meet those challenges, Amazon Science recently spoke with scientists who are currently or were formerly professors in the robotics field and now are working on the service's critical components. They are focusing on giving Amazon Scout the tools it needs to navigate to customers by helping the delivery robot see and understand what's going on around it and giving it an accurate picture of the physical world.

Once that world is designed, Scout needs to be trained to understand it. That's accomplished in part using neural networks computer systems that recognize relationships among data. It's still Day One for Amazon Scout. The team is excited about the positive feedback from customers and results from field tests. The team expects to apply its learnings to keep moving forward on this new delivery system and Amazon's path to net-zero carbon by 2040.