Amazon’s Astro can’t fetch your beer

Amazon today introduced a new robot with the face of an Echo Show, the sensor-laden body of the Panera Bread delivery robot, and a pair of cup holders for a chest. From the moment it was announced, people have been clamoring for a reason for its existence beyond the “cute face mobile camera” and the “potentially invasive surveillance drone”. Most seemed to be content with “beer seeker”.

But my friend, a pair of cup holders doesn’t make a robot waiter.

While the $ 1,000 Astro could very well have a wide variety of abilities beyond home monitoring, it won’t earn you anything. On the one hand, it sucks. “Astro is terrible and will almost certainly throw himself down a staircase if the opportunity presents itself,” a source who claimed to be working on the project told Vice. Another source told Vice that “this is a disaster that is not ready to be released.” A robot more inclined to throw itself into the void than to perform the expected functions will not take this Heineken out of the refrigerator.

It’s also not clear how well he can see anything. Google and Snapchat have both invested heavily in creating a way for computers to interpret the real world without markers like bar codes. Amazon didn’t. He may be the creator of Rekognition, a controversial facial recognition service, but his Ring ecosystem only has the ability to recognize packages today. How long would it take Astro to recognize a beer? And what happens when this beer recognition technology fails? You might end up with a refreshing bottle of ranch dressing instead.

But the biggest problem isn’t the reports it sucks, or the failure to prove that it can distinguish between the different contents of your refrigerator. The real problem is that the robot has no arms!

There is no way for him to open a fridge, freezer, or even a Yeti cooler. He can’t even open a door. He certainly can’t get into a crowded refrigerator and pull out a cold one. I’m afraid people might think he has Doc Ock arms hidden behind his face or hope those two cup holders come out of the robot to vacuum open the fridge. They saw the cup holders and assumed there was a way to fit things in that didn’t involve someone in the other room helping them.

Image: Amazon

But there is none. Currently, there don’t appear to be any plans to build him a pair of pliers – or even a single appendix. The payload area occupied by the cup holders Is have a USB-C port, however! Theoretically, someone could build an arm. This arm could replace the cup holders.

But this arm does not yet exist. Unless you want to yell at roommates to put a beer in your bot, the Astro won’t bring you any kind of drink.