From retail to robotics, Jeff Bezos is betting big on technology
Amazon, led by a man who is always pulling new rabbits out of his hat, could soon disrupt on a mammoth scale.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man, is always pulling new rabbits out of his hat, like next-day or same-day shipping and cashier-less stores. Besides, there is Blue Origin, the aerospace company privately owned by Bezos, which is on a mission to make spaceflight possible for everyone.
Be that as it may, a lot more disruption aimed at reaching the common man is on the anvil.
The most far-reaching and impactful technologies being developed today are for Amazon’s own use, but some others have the potential to disrupt every sector.
Robotics
Amazon’s take on robotics is grounds-up. The company has been part of an opensource network that is developing ROS 2 or Robot Operating System 2, which will be commercial-grade, secure, hardened and peer reviewed in order to make it easier for developers to build robots. “There is an incredible amount of promise and potential in robotics, but if you look at what a robot developer has to do to get things up and running, it’s an incredible amount of work,” said Roger Barga, general manager, AWS Robotics and Autonomous Services, at Amazon Web Services. Apart from building the software that robots will run on, AWS is also making tools that will help developers simulate robots virtually before deploying them on the ground, gather data to run analytics on the cloud and even manage a fleet of robots.
While AWS will largely build tools for developers, as capabilities such as autonomous navigation become commonplace, the company could look to build them in-house and offer them as a service to robot developers, Barga said. With the advent of 5G technology, more of the processing capabilities of robots will be offloaded to the cloud, making them smarter and giving them real-time analytics capabilities to do a better job. For India, robot builders will be able to get into the business far more easily, having all the tools on access, overcoming the barrier of a lack of fundamental research in robotics.
