GoKawiilThe robots glide across the floor, sometimes pausing to spin a quarter turn or two before resuming their route. They come close to one another but never collide. It's not choreographed – they're adapting on the fly – but the movement does have the feel of a ballet.
If ballet dancers were mechanized platforms on wheels, that is. Flat-topped and low to the ground, like oversized bathroom scales granted the gift of movement and the ability to navigate on their own.
These are Amazon's Proteus robots in action.
In a spacious Amazon warehouse in London, as in its counterparts around the world, Proteus, Titan and fellow robots are perpetually tasked with fetch quests – finding and retrieving shelving units that contain items that all of us order day in and day out and bringing them to stations where those items are picked, packed and sent on their way.
Some of those days are busier than others – Prime Day sales, for example, when Amazon orders surge. During these periods, fulfillment centers bring on thousands more workers and the robots keep pace.
We visited two Amazon locations – the LCY3 London fulfillment center and the BOS27 robot development facility in Westborough, Massachusetts – to better understand the role robots play in ensuring our packages reach us at speed, both now and in the future.
After decades of humanity's sci-fi-inspired preoccupation with robots, advances in AI (including large language models and vision language models) over the past five years are increasingly allowing robots to interact with people in more natural ways. For the most part, these real-world robots bear little resemblance to the pop culture depictions, particularly of the humanoid variety. Humanoids are starting to spring up, but most robots around us today are much closer to the type Amazon and other companies are using in industrial settings.
Proteus version two -- coming soon to a fulfillment center near you. Katie Collins/CNET
In Amazon facilities, the robots range from Proteus, which could be a Roomba's more strapping younger sibling, to Vulcan, a robotic arm with a sense of touch that can pick up objects and understand what it's handling. Altogether, Amazon has over 1 million robots operating in fulfillment centers, handling tasks such as stowing, picking, sorting and transporting.
Even though Amazon has been developing robots for years, it's still only in the early stages of growing its robotics portfolio, said Tye Brady, Amazon's chief technologist, speaking in London in early June.
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