Amazon is building a new home robot after Astro. Here’s what we know

Jeff Bezos made a bold bet in 2017. A sci-fi and robotics enthusiast, Bezos was convinced that consumers would have a robot in their home in the not-too-distant future.

The Amazon founder and then-CEO told a group of the company’s top device executives to get to work on building one, and within a few years, the team came up with the $1,450 Astro.

The public got its first look at Astro, essentially an Alexa-equipped tablet on wheels that can autonomously navigate a home, recognize faces and act as a roving security monitor, when it rolled on stage at Amazon’s fall 2021 event.

But it never evolved beyond an invite-only product. Astro shipped to just a few thousand customers, some of whom now believe the robot’s days are numbered. The company also released an Astro for businesses in 2023, before sunsetting it less than a year later.

Amazon isn’t giving up on Bezos’ dream of a household robot just yet, despite its stumbles with Astro.

Over the past several months, the company has assembled a new team that’s working on a “new-to-world robot product,” according to a CNBC analysis of job posts.

“Robots are about to step out of the movies and into our homes,” a recent job listing for an engineer, which has since been removed, stated. The post details a product capable of navigating “dynamic home environments” and “autonomous operation alongside family members.”

Amazon is known for making long-term bets at the risk of “being misunderstood” in the short term if it gives the company an early advantage in new markets, like it did with the Alexa voice assistant or Kindle e-reader.

CEO Andy Jassy reminded investors of this approach in his latest annual letter, where he said artificial intelligence and robotics were among the “biggest inflections of our lifetime.”

“We try to anticipate what will make customers’ lives easier and better every day, and invent the next inflection,” Jassy wrote.

Analysts also expect the humanoid market to surge in the coming years. Barclays forecast in a January report that the global market, which it currently values at $2 billion to $3 billion, could reach roughly $40 billion by 2035, or as high as $200 billion “under the most optimistic scenarios.”

Earlier this year, Amazon redeployed much of the team behind Astro and brought in an MIT roboticist to work on the home robot project, LinkedIn profiles show.

It also made a splashy acquisition to supercharge the effort.

In March, Amazon scooped up New York-based Fauna Robotics, which has built a 3.5-foot-tall humanoid called Sprout. At the time, the company said Fauna would become part of a new division dubbed the Personal Robotics Group. 

Some Personal Robotics Group staffers previously worked in Amazon’s Lab126 R&D unit, which has been behind many of Amazon’s most successful consumer hardware products, like the Kindle e-reader, Echo smart speakers, Fire TV…