# Amazon Robotics

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/amazon_robotics
> Updated: 2026-06-23
> Categories: AI Companies, Robotics, Robotics Companies
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

**Amazon Robotics LLC** is the wholly owned robotics and warehouse-automation subsidiary of [Amazon](/wiki/amazon) that designs, manufactures, and operates the autonomous mobile robots, robotic arms, gantry systems, and coordination software running inside Amazon's global fulfillment and sortation network. It was founded in 2003 in Boston as **Kiva Systems** by Mick Mountz, Peter Wurman, and Raffaello D'Andrea, acquired by Amazon on March 19, 2012 for about $775 million in cash, and rebranded as Amazon Robotics in August 2015. [3] It is headquartered at 300 Riverpark Drive in North Reading, Massachusetts, with major facilities in Westborough, Massachusetts and a research presence in Berlin, Germany and Sumner, Washington.

In July 2025 Amazon announced it had deployed its one millionth robot across more than 300 fulfillment and sortation buildings, alongside the launch of **DeepFleet**, a generative AI foundation model that coordinates the movement of those robots and improves their travel time by about 10 percent. [6][29] By that milestone Amazon operated what it and outside analysts describe as the largest fleet of mobile [warehouse robots](/wiki/warehouse_robot) on Earth, with roughly three in four packages, about 75 percent of global deliveries, facilitated in some way by robotics, and with the company reporting nearly as many robots in its buildings as people. [6] The fleet is also the most consequential argument for the modern wave of warehouse automation, because every Amazon competitor has had to react to it.

## How did Amazon Robotics start, and why did it acquire Kiva Systems?

Kiva Systems was founded in January 2003 by Mick Mountz, an MIT-trained engineer who had worked on the business process team at the failed grocery-delivery startup Webvan. Mountz had concluded that the inflexibility of conventional conveyor-and-rack material handling, with humans walking miles per shift to fetch products from fixed shelves, was a major reason Webvan's economics never worked. He partnered with Peter Wurman, a multi-agent systems researcher, and Raffaello D'Andrea, a control-theory roboticist then at Cornell University and later a professor at ETH Zurich and a co-founder of Verity. The trio inverted the traditional warehouse model: instead of a person walking to inventory, a fleet of squat orange drive units would slide under stacked shelves, lift them, and ferry the entire shelf to a stationary picker.

Kiva's first commercial deployment was at Staples in 2006, followed by Walgreens, Gap, Office Depot, Crate & Barrel, Saks Fifth Avenue, Gilt Groupe, and the shoe retailer Zappos. Zappos was acquired by Amazon in 2009, which gave Amazon's operations teams direct exposure to Kiva drives running at scale. By 2011 Kiva was the most visible name in goods-to-person robotics and was negotiating to expand its customer base.

On March 19, 2012, Amazon announced it would acquire Kiva for approximately $775 million in cash. [3] It was Amazon's second-largest acquisition at that point, behind only Zappos itself, and its biggest deal since the Zappos purchase in 2009. The deal closed in the second quarter of 2012. Almost immediately Amazon began the controversial step of winding down Kiva's external customer relationships, which left other large retailers scrambling to find substitute systems. That decision is widely credited as the trigger event for an entire crop of new warehouse-robotics startups, including Locus Robotics, 6 River Systems, Fetch Robotics, GreyOrange, and ultimately Symbotic's relationship with Walmart.

In August 2015 the subsidiary officially renamed itself from Kiva Systems LLC to Amazon Robotics LLC and began consolidating its Massachusetts footprint. A new 350,000-square-foot manufacturing and R&D campus opened in Westborough in October 2021, adding more than 200 manufacturing jobs and joining the original North Reading headquarters. [22] Amazon Robotics also operates an Innovation Lab in Seattle, the Berlin Robotics Center in Germany, and a research and pilot facility in Sumner, Washington that is used for trials of next-generation hardware including humanoid platforms.

## What robots does Amazon Robotics make?

Amazon Robotics builds machines along three main axes: drive units that move pods or carts (the Kiva-derived line), robotic arms that pick and sort packages, and integrated storage-and-retrieval systems that combine the two. New machines are typically introduced at Amazon's annual Delivering the Future conference, which has been held in Boston, in Dortmund, Germany (since 2024), and at a delivery station in Milpitas, California in October 2025, before moving to London in June 2026.

| Robot | Year introduced | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kiva drive unit (orange) | 2006 (pre-acquisition) | Drive unit | Original goods-to-person AGV; slides under shelves and lifts up to 1,000 lb |
| Hercules | 2016 (deployed) | Drive unit | Heavier-payload version of the Kiva drive, lifts up to 1,250 lb pods, navigates with 3D camera |
| Titan | 2017 | Drive unit | Heavy-duty drive, lifts roughly twice as much as Hercules, used for bulky and oversized items |
| Pegasus | June 2019 | Conveyor-on-wheels | Sortation drive with a small belt on top; carries individual packages to chute openings, improved sort accuracy by about 50 percent |
| Xanthus | June 2019 | Drive platform | Thinner, modular successor base used to build many later drive variants; one-third the parts of original Kiva |
| Robin | 2021 | Robotic arm | Vision-based arm that picks shipped packages off conveyors and places them on Pegasus drives |
| Bert and Ernie | 2021 (prototypes) | AMR / arm | Bert is an autonomous mobile robot that ferries items; Ernie removes totes from shelving at safer ergonomic heights |
| Scooter | 2021 (prototype) | Drive unit | Pulls strings of GoCart wheeled carts through fulfillment centers |
| Proteus | June 2022 | Autonomous mobile robot | Amazon's first fully autonomous AMR, certified to operate in shared space with humans without floor barcodes; moves GoCarts in outbound areas |
| Cardinal | June 2022 | Robotic workcell | Picks individual packages weighing up to 50 lb out of a pile, reads the label, and places them in a GoCart |
| Sparrow | November 2022 | Vision-based picking arm | Picks individual customer items out of inventory totes; latest versions identify more than 200 million unique products |
| Sequoia | October 2023 | Containerized storage and retrieval system | Combines mobile robots, gantry systems, and arms to consolidate inventory in totes; identifies and stores inventory up to 75 percent faster |
| Vulcan | May 2025 | Pick-and-stow arm with tactile sensing | First Amazon robot with a sense of touch via force feedback; reaches the highest and lowest shelves in storage pods, handles roughly three quarters of stored item types |
| Blue Jay | October 2025 | Multi-arm sortation workcell | Ceiling-mounted system of multiple coordinated arms that picks, stows, and consolidates at one station; piloted in South Carolina, halted after under six months |
| STARK | June 2026 (Europe) | Collaborative tote-handling arm | Force-limited arm that lifts full totes off conveyors onto carts; first piloted in Barcelona |
| Next-generation Proteus | June 2026 | Autonomous mobile robot | Successor AMR that accepts natural-language commands and works across fulfillment and delivery sites, not just dock areas |

The Kiva drive remains the workhorse of the fleet, with later variants such as Hercules and the Xanthus-platform descendants making up most of the more than one million units in the field. Sparrow and Vulcan represent the harder problem of picking and stowing individual items, which historically resisted automation because Amazon's catalog contains an enormous variety of shapes, sizes, weights, and packaging materials. Sparrow handles inventory totes; Cardinal handles outbound packages; Robin handles arriving labelled packages on conveyors. Sequoia is the integrated system that strings several of these together inside a single building, and was first deployed at the Houston BHM1 fulfillment center in October 2023 before being scaled out at the next-generation facility in Shreveport, Louisiana in 2024, where Sequoia holds more than 30 million items, about five times the original deployment. [16][17]

### What is Proteus, and why was it significant?

Proteus, unveiled in June 2022, is described by Amazon as "Amazon's first fully autonomous mobile robot, meaning it can navigate freely throughout a site using sensors to detect and avoid objects in front of it." [14] Unlike the Kiva-derived drives, which move along grids of floor barcodes inside areas fenced off from people, Proteus is certified to operate in the same open space as employees, which Amazon and The Robot Report framed as a decade-in-the-making step beyond the original 2012 Kiva technology. [14][15] The original Proteus moves wheeled GoCarts in outbound dock areas; the next-generation Proteus shown in June 2026 extends the platform to accept natural-language commands and to work across fulfillment and delivery sites. [38]

### 2025-2026 developments

In the year after the one millionth robot milestone Amazon disclosed several new systems, expanded its tactile manipulation program internationally, and pulled one widely promoted machine after a short pilot.

**One millionth robot and DeepFleet (July 2025).** Amazon dated the milestone to a robot delivered to a fulfillment center in Japan, announced on July 1, 2025, and said its fleet then spanned more than 300 facilities worldwide. [6][29] The company stated that about 75 percent of its global deliveries, or three in four packages, are at that point assisted in some way by robotics, and that its buildings could eventually hold close to as many robots as people. [6] DeepFleet, the coordination foundation model launched with the milestone, is described by Amazon Robotics VP Scott Dresser as an intelligent traffic system that reduces robot travel time by roughly 10 percent, which Amazon links to faster delivery, lower operating cost, and reduced energy use. [29][30] In August 2025 Amazon Robotics posted a technical report titled "DeepFleet: Multi-Agent Foundation Models for Mobile Robots" to arXiv (revised in April 2026), describing four model designs evaluated against fleet data from hundreds of thousands of robots: a robot-centric decision transformer (about 97 million parameters), a robot-and-floor cross-attention model (about 840 million parameters), an image-based convolutional model of the whole fleet, and a graph-neural-network model of spatial relationships (about 13 million parameters). The report says the robot-centric and graph-floor variants, which use asynchronous robot state updates and localized interaction structure, performed best and scaled with larger datasets. [28][31]

**Blue Jay and Project Eluna (October 2025).** At its 2025 Delivering the Future event, held at the DUR3 delivery station in Milpitas, California on October 22, 2025, Amazon unveiled **Blue Jay**, a ceiling-mounted workcell in which multiple robotic arms work together to pick, stow, and consolidate items at a single station, collapsing what Amazon said had previously been three separate robotic stations into one. Amazon said the system handled about 75 percent of the item types at its pilot site, a Same-Day Delivery facility in South Carolina, and that it was developed in just over a year, compared with three or more years for earlier systems, with help from AI and digital-twin simulation. [32][33] At the same event Amazon described **Project Eluna**, an agentic AI tool meant to act as an extra teammate for operations managers by combining historical and real-time building data to flag bottlenecks and recommend actions in natural language; it was first piloted at a Tennessee fulfillment center over the holiday season with an initial focus on sortation. [33][34] Amazon also showed **Amelia**, AI-equipped smart glasses for delivery drivers that provide turn-by-turn directions and capture proof of delivery; the glasses sit in Amazon's transportation organization rather than Amazon Robotics and were still in testing with hundreds of drivers. [35] Tye Brady, chief technologist for Amazon Robotics, framed the announcements around making technology "the most practical, the most powerful tool it can be" so that work becomes safer and more rewarding. [33]

**Blue Jay halt (early 2026).** Amazon stopped the Blue Jay program after less than six months, with reporting in February 2026 indicating the project had been wound down around January 2026. Multiple outlets attributed the decision to steep manufacturing costs and complex installation tied to the ceiling-mounted structure. Amazon spokesperson Terrence Clark said Blue Jay "was launched as a prototype" and that the company is "accelerating the use of the underlying technology developed for Blue Jay," with nearly all of those technologies carried over to other systems; employees on the project were reassigned. [36][37] The shutdown was widely read as an example of the gap between fast progress in AI software and the slower, costlier work of fielding new hardware in the physical world.

**Next-generation Proteus and European expansion (June 2026).** At the Delivering the Future event in London on June 4, 2026, Amazon introduced a next-generation Proteus that accepts natural-language commands, so workers can direct it conversationally without a programming interface, and that can operate across fulfillment and delivery sites rather than only in dock areas as the original 2022 model did. Dresser said of the robot, "You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing." [38][39] Amazon said it was piloting the system in its labs and planned to deploy it in Europe in the first half of 2027. [38][39] The robot was announced as part of a plan to invest more than 10 billion euros (about $11.6 billion) in expanding and modernizing Amazon's European fulfillment network and to add 25,000 jobs across Europe in the coming years. [38][39] Amazon also said its **STARK** collaborative tote-handling system, which uses a force-limited robotic arm to lift full totes from conveyors onto carts and was first piloted in Barcelona, Spain, would expand to 15 European sites by 2027, and that the tactile Vulcan system, operating at Spokane, Washington and Hamburg, Germany, would roll out to more sites in the United States and Europe. By mid-2026 Amazon said Vulcan had processed more than 500,000 orders. [38][39]

## How many robots does Amazon have?

Amazon's published robot deployment numbers tracked roughly as follows, reaching more than one million units by July 2025.

| Year | Approximate fleet size | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2014 | ~15,000 | Two years after the Kiva deal |
| 2017 | ~100,000 | Disclosed in Amazon's annual letter |
| 2019 | ~200,000 | Stated by Amazon in June 2019 |
| 2021 | ~350,000 | Per Amazon and Modern Materials Handling reporting |
| 2023 | ~750,000 | Internal tracker shared with Distribution Strategy Group [8] |
| July 2025 | 1,000,000+ | Announced alongside DeepFleet; milestone unit delivered to a fulfillment center in Japan [6][29] |

The million-robot fleet is spread across more than 300 Amazon fulfillment centers, sortation centers, and delivery stations worldwide. Amazon Robotics also operates a global manufacturing footprint to keep up; Westborough produces drive units for North America, and contract partners build Sparrow and Cardinal cells.

## What AI and software power Amazon's robots?

Amazon Robotics relies heavily on machine learning and modern AI for both perception and coordination. The biggest publicly disclosed pieces of the stack are:

- **DeepFleet**, announced in July 2025, is described by Amazon as the company's first [foundation model](/wiki/foundation_model) for multirobot coordination. It predicts the future positions of every drive unit in a building, and Amazon estimates it improves robot travel efficiency by about 10 percent fleetwide. [28][29] Amazon trained DeepFleet on what it calls billions of hours of robot navigation data using [Amazon SageMaker](/wiki/amazon_sagemaker) on [Amazon Web Services](/wiki/amazon_web_services). [28] Joey Durham, a senior manager of applied science at Amazon Robotics, framed the bet in language borrowed from large language models: "We believe that, just as pretraining on next-word prediction enabled chatbots to answer a diverse range of questions, pretraining on location prediction can enable an AI to generate general solutions for mobile-robot fleets." [28] An August 2025 Amazon Robotics technical report on arXiv details four candidate architectures, ranging from a 13-million-parameter graph-neural-network model to an 840-million-parameter robot-and-floor model, and reports that robot-centric and graph-neural-network variants performed best across data from hundreds of thousands of robots. [31]
- **Project Eluna**, an agentic AI system that helps human operators triage exceptions on the floor by surfacing relevant data and suggested actions. Amazon presented it publicly in October 2025 and began piloting it at a Tennessee fulfillment center for the holiday season, starting with sortation optimization. [33][34]
- **Computer vision** for item identification on Sparrow, defect detection during stow, package label reading on Cardinal, and pose estimation on Robin. Models run on a mix of on-robot edge accelerators and central inference servers.
- **Reinforcement learning** for Sparrow's grasp policies, including sim-to-real training pipelines built on internal physics simulators.
- **Tactile policies** on Vulcan, which fuse force feedback from end-of-arm sensors with vision to plan and execute motions in cluttered storage pods. [10] Amazon's research team at amazon.science has published technical write-ups describing the contact-rich planning approach. [10]
- **Natural-language task interfaces**, first deployed in the next-generation Proteus shown in June 2026, which let workers assign jobs to a robot in plain language and have the robot plan priority, route, and timing on its own. [38]

Amazon has also said it expects to use [Amazon Bedrock](/wiki/amazon_bedrock) hosted foundation models to support natural-language operator interfaces and richer robot perception, although the deployed pipelines for Sparrow and Vulcan are largely Amazon-internal models.

## Do Amazon's robots replace human workers?

Amazon's public position is that robots augment its human workforce rather than replace it. The company has repeatedly noted that hourly headcount in fulfillment has continued to grow since the Kiva acquisition, and it points to programs like Career Choice, the Apprenticeship program for robotics technicians, and an upskilling pledge to invest more than $1.2 billion to retrain 300,000 employees by 2025 as evidence that automation creates new technical roles, not just job displacement. New roles include flow control specialists, robotics floor monitors, reliability and maintenance engineering technicians, and robotic systems mechanics.

That picture is contested. Investigations by The New York Times, Reuters, The Atlantic, and others have documented that injury rates at Amazon warehouses, especially robot-equipped sortable fulfillment centers, run higher than at non-Amazon warehouses. The Strategic Organizing Center, a union-backed coalition, reported in its April 2022 study "The Injury Machine" that the serious-injury rate at Amazon's robot-equipped sortable facilities reached 7.3 per 100 workers in 2021, about 28 percent higher than the 5.7 per 100 rate at non-robotic Amazon sortable facilities, and roughly double the broader warehouse industry rate. [24] Critics argue that automation enables faster pace-of-work targets that strain workers, while Amazon counters that newer robots like Sequoia and Vulcan are explicitly designed to remove ergonomically taxing reaches and bends. The injury debate is ongoing and is one of the most-watched labor stories in U.S. logistics. [25]

When Amazon announced its 25,000 new European jobs alongside the next-generation Proteus in June 2026, it again framed the automation push as a transformation built around supporting employees. Armin Cossmann, a vice president of operations for Europe, said the changes were designed to deliver a step change in how the company supports its workforce. Coverage of the same announcement noted that it landed during a period of continuing AI-related layoffs across large technology companies, which kept the automation-versus-jobs question prominent. [38][39]

## Notable partnerships and investments

Amazon's $1 billion **Industrial Innovation Fund**, launched in April 2022, has been the main vehicle for backing outside robotics startups whose technology might eventually plug into Amazon Robotics. Public investments and pilots include:

- **Agility Robotics**, the Oregon State University spinoff that builds the bipedal humanoid robot [Digit](/wiki/agility_digit). Amazon invested through the Industrial Innovation Fund in 2022, and in October 2023 began trialing Digit at Amazon's robotics R&D facility in Sumner, Washington, south of Seattle, on a tote-recycling task. [20][21]
- **Glacier**, an AI sorting startup focused on recycling, which received funding to deploy in Amazon facilities.
- **Mantis Robotics**, **Modjoul**, **BionicHIVE**, and other smaller robotics and exoskeleton companies.
- **Plus.ai** and **Aurora**, both autonomous-trucking companies, have had separate engagements with Amazon's middle-mile transportation arm rather than Amazon Robotics directly.
- **Veo Robotics** technology and other safety-rated perception suppliers feed into Amazon's collaborative robot certification work.

## Locations and facilities

| Site | Function | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| North Reading, Massachusetts | Headquarters | Original Kiva HQ; corporate, software, and applied research |
| Westborough, Massachusetts | Manufacturing and R&D | 350,000 sq ft facility opened October 2021 |
| Boston, Massachusetts (greater) | Engineering | Hosts the annual Delivering the Future event |
| Sumner, Washington | Innovation Lab | Where Proteus and the Digit pilot were tested |
| Spokane, Washington (BFI4) | First Vulcan pilot | Vulcan rolled out to top and bottom shelves |
| Houston, Texas (BHM1) | First Sequoia deployment | Sequoia debut, October 2023 |
| Shreveport, Louisiana | Most automated fulfillment center | 2024 launch with eight robotic systems and Sequoia |
| Hamburg, Germany | European Vulcan deployment | Vulcan operational since 2024 |
| Berlin, Germany | Berlin Robotics Center | AI and computer vision research |
| South Carolina (Same-Day site) | First Blue Jay pilot | Blue Jay piloted from October 2025, program halted in early 2026 |
| Barcelona, Spain | First STARK pilot | Tote-handling system slated to reach 15 European sites by 2027 |

## How does Amazon Robotics compare with competitors like Symbotic?

Amazon Robotics sits in the middle of a wider warehouse-automation industry, but its model (in-house technology used only by its parent) is unusual. Most other major players sell to third-party retailers and grocers.

| Company | Founded | Headquarters | Customer base | Robot type | Notable product or partner |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [Amazon](/wiki/amazon) Robotics | 2003 (as Kiva) | North Reading, MA | Amazon only since 2012 | AMRs, gantries, picking arms | Sequoia, Sparrow, Vulcan, DeepFleet |
| Symbotic | 2007 | Wilmington, MA | Walmart, Albertsons, C&S | High-density ASRS plus AGVs | Walmart automation, $520M Symbotic-Walmart deal 2024 |
| Ocado Intelligent Automation | 2000 (Ocado Group) | Hatfield, UK | Kroger, Aeon, ICA, Sobeys | Hive-grid robots, picking arms | Customer Fulfilment Centres (CFCs) |
| AutoStore | 1996 | Nedre Vats, Norway | More than 1,000 customers | Cube-storage robots on top of bin grid | AutoStore R5 / B1 |
| Locus Robotics | 2014 | Wilmington, MA | DHL, GEODIS, FedEx, Boots | Collaborative AMRs | LocusBot |
| GreyOrange | 2011 | Atlanta, GA / Gurgaon | Apparel, retail, parcel | Butler goods-to-person AMRs | GreyMatter software |
| Geek+ | 2015 | Beijing | Large-scale e-commerce in Asia | P-series goods-to-person, M-series | Used by Walmart Mexico, Decathlon |
| 6 River Systems | 2015 | Waltham, MA | DHL, Lockheed, others | Collaborative cart bots (Chuck) | Acquired by Shopify 2019, then Ocado 2024 |
| Dematic (KION) | 1819 | Atlanta, GA | Broad cross-industry | Conveyors, AS/RS, AMRs | Multishuttle |
| Knapp | 1952 | Hart bei Graz, Austria | Pharma, fashion, food | Pick-it-easy, OSR Shuttle | YLOG-Shuttle |
| Honeywell Intelligrated | acquired 2016 | Mason, OH | Parcel, retail | Sortation, conveyors, robotic arms | Universal Robotics depalletizer |

Symbotic in particular has emerged as the closest peer, in the sense that Walmart effectively rebuilt its automated regional distribution centers around Symbotic systems and then sold its in-house robotics group to Symbotic in 2024 for $200 million plus a $520 million development commitment. [27] This is the most direct case of a major retailer making the same in-house bet that Amazon made in 2012, just twelve years later and via a publicly traded partner.

## Future and research

Amazon Robotics' near-term roadmap, as disclosed by VP Scott Dresser and through amazon.science publications, involves three big themes:

1. Foundation models for everything inside the building. DeepFleet is the first generative model for fleet coordination, and the company has signaled similar models for picking policies, anomaly detection, and even high-level workflow scheduling. The next-generation Proteus shown in June 2026 extends the same direction by letting workers task robots in natural language. [38]
2. Tactile and dexterous manipulation. Vulcan's force-feedback design is the first deployed example, and Amazon's research teams have published on contact-rich planning, multi-modal grasping, and learned manipulation policies. [10]
3. Human-form robots. Amazon is one of the largest commercial pilots of bipedal humanoids via the [Agility Robotics](/wiki/agility_robotics) Digit trial, and is widely expected to evaluate other platforms (such as Apptronik's Apollo, Figure 02, or 1X NEO) as the humanoid market matures. The company has been clear that humanoids are an option, not the assumed future, and that wheeled drives like Hercules will continue to do most of the work for the foreseeable future.

The Blue Jay episode in early 2026 also shaped how the roadmap is read from the outside. Amazon kept the underlying technology while retiring the ceiling-mounted hardware, which analysts treated as a sign that the company will keep iterating quickly and discard specific machines that do not justify their cost, even ones it has publicly promoted. [36][37]

A related but separate Amazon program, **Prime Air**, has been working on autonomous delivery drones since 2013. Prime Air sits inside Amazon's transportation organization rather than Amazon Robotics, although the two groups share talent on perception and motion planning.

## Significance

Amazon Robotics did not invent warehouse automation, but it did three things that reshaped the industry:

First, it proved that goods-to-person mobile robotics worked at the largest possible scale. Kiva's drive units were a research curiosity in 2006 and the dominant warehouse design pattern in the world by 2020.

Second, by ending Kiva's external sales after the acquisition, Amazon both denied competitors a turnkey solution and indirectly seeded an entire generation of independent warehouse-robotics startups. Almost every major non-Amazon warehouse robotics company traces some lineage to that decision.

Third, Amazon set a template that competitors have been forced to copy: own the automation technology, deploy it internally at scale, and treat the resulting cost and speed advantages as a strategic moat. Walmart's bet on Symbotic, Kroger's partnership with Ocado, and Target's investment in robotic micro-fulfillment are all responses to that template.

As of the company's own July 2025 milestone, Amazon Robotics operates the largest deployed mobile-robot fleet on the planet, with more than one million robots and roughly three in four packages touched by automation. [6][29] Whether that fleet ultimately replaces, augments, or simply reshapes the work of the millions of humans who still pick and pack inside Amazon buildings remains the most consequential open question in the entire field of [robotics](/wiki/robotics).

## See also

- [Gecko Robotics](/wiki/gecko_robotics)
- [Chef Robotics](/wiki/chef_robotics)

## References

1. Amazon Robotics, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Robotics
2. Mick Mountz, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Mountz
3. Amazon Acquires Robot-Coordinated Order Fulfillment Company Kiva Systems For $775 Million In Cash, TechCrunch, March 19, 2012. https://techcrunch.com/2012/03/19/amazon-acquires-online-fulfillment-company-kiva-systems-for-775-million-in-cash/
4. Amazon Goes Robotic, Acquires Kiva Systems, Singularity Hub, March 21, 2012. https://singularityhub.com/2012/03/21/amazon-goes-robotic-acquires-kiva-systems-makers-of-the-warehouse-robot/
5. Kiva Systems / Amazon Robotics, Raffaello D'Andrea project page. https://raffaello.name/project/kiva-amazon-robotics/
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12. Amazon introduces Sparrow, a state-of-the-art robot, Amazon, November 2022. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-introduces-sparrow-a-state-of-the-art-robot-that-handles-millions-of-diverse-products
13. Amazon debuts Sparrow, a new bin-picking robot arm, TechCrunch, November 10, 2022. https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/10/amazon-debuts-a-new-bin-picking-robot-arm/
14. Amazon debuts a fully autonomous warehouse robot (Proteus and Cardinal), TechCrunch, June 22, 2022. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/22/amazon-debuts-a-fully-autonomous-warehouse-robot/
15. A decade after acquiring Kiva, Amazon unveils its first AMR, The Robot Report. https://www.therobotreport.com/a-decade-after-acquiring-kiva-amazon-unveils-its-first-amr/
16. Amazon announces 2 new ways it's using robots (Sequoia and Digit), Amazon, October 2023. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-introduces-new-robotics-solutions
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18. Amazon debuts a pair of new warehouse robots (Pegasus and Xanthus), TechCrunch, June 5, 2019. https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/05/amazon-debuts-a-pair-of-new-warehouse-robots/
19. Amazon's Pegasus fulfillment center robot improves sorting accuracy, VentureBeat, June 5, 2019. https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/05/amazon-says-its-new-pegasus-fulfillment-center-robot-improves-throughput-by-50/
20. Agility Robotics broadens relationship with Amazon. https://www.agilityrobotics.com/content/agility-robotics-broadens-relationship-with-amazon
21. Amazon begins testing Agility's Digit robot for warehouse work, TechCrunch, October 18, 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/18/amazon-begins-testing-agilitys-digit-robot-for-warehouse-work/
22. Amazon Opens New Robotics Manufacturing Facility in Massachusetts (Westborough), Robotics 24/7, October 2021. https://www.robotics247.com/article/amazon_opens_new_robotics_manufacturing_facility_in_massachusetts
23. See inside Amazon's robotics headquarters in suburban Westborough, Amazon. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-robotics-headquarters-tour-westborough-massachusetts
24. The Injury Machine: How Amazon's Production System Hurts Workers, Strategic Organizing Center, April 2022. https://thesoc.org/resources/the-injury-machine-how-amazons-production-system-hurts-workers/
25. Amazon's Approach to Robotics Is Seriously Injuring Warehouse Workers, OnLabor. https://onlabor.org/amazons-approach-to-robotics-is-seriously-injuring-warehouse-workers/
26. Top 30 warehouse robotics and automation companies, Robotics & Automation News, April 2025. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/04/12/top-30-warehouse-robotics-and-automation-companies/89674/
27. Symbotic acquires Walmart's robotics business, multiple reports, 2024.
28. Amazon builds first foundation model for multirobot coordination, Amazon Science, 2025. https://www.amazon.science/blog/amazon-builds-first-foundation-model-for-multirobot-coordination
29. Amazon deploys over 1 million robots and launches new AI foundation model, Amazon, July 1, 2025. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-million-robots-ai-foundation-model
30. Amazon launches new AI foundation model, deploys 1 millionth robot, The Robot Report, July 1, 2025. https://www.therobotreport.com/amazon-launches-new-ai-foundation-model-deploys-1-millionth-robot/
31. DeepFleet: Multi-Agent Foundation Models for Mobile Robots, arXiv:2508.08574, Amazon Robotics, August 2025 (revised April 2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08574
32. Amazon introduces 'Blue Jay' warehouse robot that performs multiple tasks at once, CNBC, October 22, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/22/amazon-debuts-blue-jay-robot-that-performs-multiple-tasks-at-once.html
33. Amazon's new robot Blue Jay capable of moving multiple items at once, Amazon, October 2025. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/new-robots-amazon-fulfillment-agentic-ai
34. Amazon unveils Blue Jay robotics system and Project Eluna AI to boost fulfillment efficiency, Robotics & Automation News, October 23, 2025. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/10/23/amazon-unveils-new-robotic-arms-and-agentic-ai-system-for-its-fulfillment-operations/95789/
35. Amazon unveils AI smart glasses for its delivery drivers, TechCrunch, October 22, 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/22/amazon-unveils-ai-smart-glasses-for-its-delivery-drivers/
36. Amazon halts Blue Jay robotics project after less than 6 months, TechCrunch, February 18, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/18/amazon-halts-blue-jay-robotics-project-after-less-than-six-months/
37. Amazon Robotics shuts down Blue Jay sortation project, The Robot Report, February 2026. https://www.therobotreport.com/amazon-robotics-shuts-down-blue-jay-sortation-project/
38. Amazon unveils next-gen Proteus robot as part of 10 billion euro European investment in its fulfillment network, Amazon, June 4, 2026. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-proteus-robot-europe-investment-employee-support
39. Proteus gets natural-language ability as Amazon expands European robot deployments, The Robot Report, June 2026. https://www.therobotreport.com/proteus-gets-natural-language-ability-amazon-expands-europe-robot-deployments/