Amazon's Proteus robot now takes plain-language commands, heads to Europe by 2027

Amazon's new Proteus warehouse robot is fully autonomous - Engadget

Amazon has put more than a million robots into its warehouses but none so far have been able to "talk" with human employees. However, a new version of its Proteus robot can now be directed by workers using plain language thanks to an AI upgrade, Amazon announced. "You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing," said Amazon Robotics VP Scott Dresser. Proteus looks like a heavy-duty Roomba and is designed to move heavy carts and cover long distances within fulfillment centers. Before, commanding such robots required the use of custom software. Now, employees can assign tasks to the latest AI-powered models using plain language, much as they would with another employee. The extra intelligence also allows the system to work all around warehouses rather than just in the dock areas as before. That means they can be used to transport containers arriving on site, transfer them between workstations and assist employees. Amazon is piloting the new system in its labs, but plans to start using them in Europe in the first half of 2027. It also plans to expand the use of its Vulcan touch-sensitive robot and introduce another one for handling "totes" (smaller containers) with precision, called Stark. Amazon says that the new Proteus robots will help employees "focus on higher-skilled work like managing inventory flow and ensuring quality control." It added that such systems improve safety and reduce repetitive work. At the same time, Amazon said it hasn't replaced human jobs and announced plans to expand its European warehouse workforce by 25,000 in the coming years. "Since introducing robotics into its operations, Amazon has hired hundreds of thousands of employees globally," the company wrote. However, Amazon has also laid off nearly 30,000 workers over the past year or so across its retail, web services, Prime Video and other units. The company doesn't have a stellar track record in the area of safety, either. In 2024, the company employed 39 percent of US warehouse workers but accounted for 56 percent of serious injuries, the Strategic Organizing Center reported last year.

Amazon's new Proteus robot takes plain-language orders, headed to Europe in 2027

The next-generation robot drops the programming interface for conversational commands, the centrepiece of a €10bn European fulfilment investment. The pitch for Amazon's new warehouse robot is that you talk to it. At its "Delivering the Future" event at the Dartford fulfilment centre east of London on 4 June, Amazon unveiled a next-generation Proteus that takes instructions in plain language, no technical commands and no programming interface, alongside a plan to invest more than €10bn (about $11.6bn) in its European fulfilment network over the coming years. The interface is the headline change. "You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing," said Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, describing the robot as an assistant for material movement. Where the current Proteus, deployed at 25 US sites, works only in dock areas moving carts that can weigh close to 400kg, the new version is designed to operate anywhere across a fulfilment or delivery site, transporting containers as they arrive and ferrying them between workstations. It is not shipping yet. The next-generation Proteus is being piloted in Amazon's labs, with European deployment planned for the first half of 2027. That timeline puts it alongside two other systems Amazon is expanding across the region: STARK, a collaborative tote-handling robot first piloted in Barcelona and set to reach 15 European sites by 2027, and Vulcan, the company's first robot with a sense of touch, which has moved from Spokane, Washington to its Hamburg facility in Germany. The money is the larger commitment. Amazon framed the robotics as one piece of a plan to invest more than €10bn modernising European fulfilment, and said it would grow its European fulfilment-centre workforce by 25,000 in the coming years. That headcount figure is the company's answer, stated upfront, to the obvious question about automation and jobs, paired with its claim that robotics has created new categories of work in reliability, maintenance, and engineering. The robots came bundled with a delivery-speed push. Amazon said it will open more than 25 sub-same-day delivery sites across Europe this year, including in Britain and Germany, and expand Amazon Now, its ultra-fast essentials service, to Manchester and Birmingham. Same-day fresh-grocery delivery, it said, now reaches more than 2,300 US cities and parts of Tokyo, with further expansion planned. Its next-generation assistant, Alexa+, is due to launch in 10 more countries in 2027. The spending sits inside a much larger one. In February, Amazon forecast a more than 50% jump in capital expenditure to $200bn this year, joining its peers in an infrastructure build-out driven by AI. Against that, €10bn for European fulfilment is a regional line item rather than the headline, but it is the part with a face on it: a robot that, by 2027, an Amazon worker in Dartford or Hamburg is meant to be able to instruct simply by telling it what to do. Whether it works as smoothly on a live warehouse floor as it does in a lab is the thing the 2027 rollout will actually test.