Amazon would have loved to hand some of its short-range delivery tasks over to robots. But they've given up live testing of their "Scout" program. About 400 employees who worked on it will be reassigned, they say, and maybe they'll find something else for their robots to do.
It worked by using self-driving technology within small areas. The video below shows that, and shows other companies trying the idea on retail deliveries.
It looks feasible, so why did Amazon shelve it? Because AI is not as close to human performance as some would like to think. In spite of big amounts of data pouring into it from cameras, Scout bots would get stopped by things like trash on the sidewalk. Feedback from customers was not good enough.
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