Transcript of The Science Behind Astro | Amazon Astro

foreign this type of product didn't exist it was an unrealized vision for many years I was really excited to be able to work on something that was so complex and so sort of new within Amazon as well as new to world it's taking science fiction and making it a reality [Music] and one of the Senior Management meetings we talked about does anybody in the room think that in five ten years you're not going to have robots in your home and everybody's like yeah we are so we said well let's get started so that's when we really started to get into a lot of the fun experiences around sort of inventing what the customer experience should be for a feature that was just a line on a piece of paper prior to that we've pulled together Technologies from all these different areas to build something that so many roboticists have been dreaming about or thinking about the question wasn't should we build it but why wouldn't we no Astro can see infer here on this time but then you add Mobility on top of it Astro is a robot that can go up to a meter per second it has to detect walls it has to detect challenging situations this is going to be an autonomous device that's driving around your home we had to make sure that there was a system that was always looking out and can stop Astro in a moment's notice slam is simultaneous localization and mapping this is a standard term used in robotics it's an old problem it's not a new problem the complexity is immense it's well known in an Islam community that people will sort of say solved the math 20 years ago we still haven't figured out how to do it and this is a great example of how you've actually taken the math and deliver a truly impressive system the robot has these cameras and it'll look around and it'll find points and it's able to see if it recognizes where it is in this cloud of points in space Astra is doing millions and millions of calculations every second we have multiple neural networks running in parallel based on camera input we have multiple planners in this thing figuring out what to do and how to tie it all together and kind of the neat thing about it is it's all packaged up within one robot Astro does slam really well to be able to do it locally do it so fast map out the world so quickly I'm really impressed navigating autonomously and you know building a map of its own I mean that is incredible we took inspiration from science fiction and movies and cartoons places where people have looked into the future and thought about what could it look like to have something in the home to help you we wanted to create a personality out of the top 100 robots that people love only five of them didn't have eyes it's effectively this universal symbol for communication and we are able to communicate a lot of things things that we otherwise wouldn't necessarily have been able to also we got to really think about you know what should a robot sound like phonemes and motifs and you know creating chords most consumer electronic devices are just nuts and boats you turn it on it plays a sound that's it I still come to life this is our first robot not our last robot I I think I'm excited to be able to launch Esther and shave this with my friends and family and point to the Astra and say this is what I worked on it's unlike anything I've ever done before and the technology that we have built I look at as foundational oh actually it's a huge step forward the next question will be when should I get one