Big tech is throwing money and talent at robots for the home
SCIENCE fiction writers and technologists have been predicting the arrival of robot butlers for the better part of a century.
“Robots are the next big thing,” said Gene Munster, co-founder of Loup Ventures, who expects the US market for home robots to quadruple to more than US$4 billion by 2025. “You know it will be a big deal because the companies with the biggest balance sheets are entering the game.”
Many companies have attempted to build domestic robots before. Nolan Bushnell, a co-founder of Atari, introduced the three-foot-tall, snowmanshaped Topo Robot back in 1983. Though it could be programmed to move around by an Apple II computer, it did little else and sold poorly. Subsequent efforts to produce useful robotic assistants in the US, Japan and China have performed only marginally better.
IRobot Corp.’s Roomba is the most successful, having sold more than 20 million units since 2002, but it currently only does one thing: vacuum.
More recently, Sony Corp. and LG Electronics Inc. have shown interest in the category. In January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, LG showed off a robot called Cloi, but the demo flopped when the bot failed to obey voice commands. Sony revealed a new version of its robotic dog Aibo, originally unveiled 20 years ago. It doesn’t do much other than bark. The canine bot also costs US$1,800, or about the same price as a real dog from a breeder.
Amazon’s Project Vesta is overseen by Gregg Zehr, a veteran executive and a key leader at the company’s Lab126 hardware division. Kenneth Kiraly, who helped develop the Kindle, helps run the show and has about doubled his team of engineers and developers to roughly 500 since the beginning of the year, according to people familiar with the effort.
Now a top priority, Project Vesta has expanded from a single floor at the main Lab126 R&D office in Sunnyvale, California, to a larger, more secure facility, the people said. Amazon has moved people from other projects to the Vesta effort and cancelled or pushed back other initiatives, they said.
An early version of Vesta will accompany customers in parts of their home where they don’t have Echo devices.