The robots glide across the floor, sometimes pausing to spin a quarter turn or two before resuming their route. They come close to one another but never collide. It’s not choreographed – they’re adapting on the fly – but the movement does have the feel of a ballet.

If ballet dancers were mechanized platforms on wheels, that is. Flat-topped and low to the ground, like oversized bathroom scales granted the gift of movement and the ability to navigate on their own.

These are Amazon’s Proteus robots in action. 

In a spacious Amazon warehouse in London, as in its counterparts around the world, Proteus, Titan and fellow robots are perpetually tasked with fetch quests – finding and retrieving shelving units that contain items that all of us order day in and day out and bringing them to stations where those items are picked, packed and sent on their way.

Some of those days are busier than others – Prime Day sales, for example, when Amazon orders surge. During these periods, fulfillment centers bring on thousands more workers and the robots keep pace.

We visited two Amazon locations – the LCY3 London fulfillment center and the BOS27 robot development facility in Westborough, Massachusetts – to better understand the role robots play in ensuring our packages reach us at speed, both now and in the future.

After decades of humanity’s sci-fi-inspired preoccupation with robots, advances in AI (including large language models and vision language models) over the past five years are increasingly allowing robots to interact with people in more natural ways. For the most part, these real-world robots bear little resemblance to the pop culture depictions, particularly of the humanoid variety. Humanoids are starting to spring up, but most robots around us today are much closer to the type Amazon and other companies are using in industrial settings.

In Amazon facilities, the robots range from Proteus, which could be a Roomba’s more strapping younger sibling, to Vulcan, a robotic arm with a sense of touch that can pick up objects and understand what it’s handling. Altogether, Amazon has over 1 million robots operating in fulfillment centers, handling tasks such as stowing, picking, sorting and transporting. 

Even though Amazon has been developing robots for years, it’s still only in the early stages of growing its robotics portfolio, said Tye Brady, Amazon’s chief technologist, speaking in London in early June.

What it’s learned so far is that robots make the environment safer, and therefore more efficient. In centers where robots have been deployed, Amazon has seen a 41% reduction in the number of accidents and a 40% increase in the amount of goods delivered. 

“The efficiencies allow us to pass on a low cost to our customers,” said Brady. “The robotic systems allow us to store more goods physically closer to our customers as well.”

Over time, Brady added, the gradual introduction of robots is creating a powerful cycle within Amazon. “We deploy systems, we learn from them, we improve them and then we expand on what they can do for people,” he said.

That’s exactly what it’s done with Proteus, with a new version ready and raring to replace the existing model in fulfillment centers across the globe in the next few years.

Freewheeling Proteus robot gets language skills

Proteus is Amazon’s first fully autonomous robot – a “collaborative robot” designed to work and move around in the same spaces as humans going about their normal activities, not cordoned off behind fences with tightly restricted access for employees. It’s loaded with sensing and navigation capabilities.

“You just put them where the people are, or put the people where they are, and they’ll get right around you,” said Travis Hearn, a QA engineer at Amazon’s BOS27 facility, located 30 miles west of Boston along a once rural road now lined with low-rise industrial and commercial buildings. Cyclone fencing divvies up sectors of a cavernous space, where a diverse array of mobility and manipulation robots go through their paces.

The more diminutive demo area for Proteus, by contrast, is wide open, simulating the fulfillment center terrain it’s built to traverse, potentially several hundred meters from where chutes drop customer packages to where those packages get placed into delivery vehicles.

A Proteus robot – 7.8 inches tall, 31.5 inches long and 29.9 inches wide – can carry up to almost 900 pounds. That’s modest compared to what the larger, lookalike Hercules and Titan mobile robots can carry (1,250 and  2,500 pounds, respectively). Racks holding the goods for delivery get stacked on top, creating tall rectangles that scoot from one station to another.

But Proteus can be much more freewheeling than its fellow bots. It doesn’t need markers on the floor to know where it is or what route to follow. It learns its environment over time. It also recognizes when something – or someone – unexpected is in the way.

“You could think of it like an invisible force field, a bubble around the vehicle. So if somebody stepped in the way of the vehicle, then it would come to a safe stop or slow down,” Scott Dresser, Amazon’s vice president of robotics, said in an interview this week at BOS27. “The intelligence is to find and detect people and safely avoid them.”

The first-generation Proteus has been around for several years, and Amazon has a little over 4,000 of them at 25 sites. Earlier this month, the company introduced the Proteus 2, which gains natural language processing so that people will be able to direct it with voice prompts.

“What makes this possible is a new AI architecture that allows employees to interact with Proteus through natural language using advancements in our generative and agentic AI systems,” said Brady. 

Amazon employees will be able to talk to the robot the same way they do their colleagues, including gesturing – with a casual, “Hey Proteus, could you take this to the corner of the building?” It will be able to figure out route planning and timing and then execute the task on its own.

The second-generation Proteus will be rolled out to Amazon facilities in the coming months.

Robots doing fulfillment work for Amazon orders

The new Proteus will be deployed at LCY3 in the first half of 2027. Meanwhile, Amazon robots are already an essential part of the furniture.

Situated in Dartford, right at London’s eastern-most point, LCY3 is a strategically located fulfillment center on the banks of the River Thames, serving the British capital and beyond. Here, Prime Day orders are picked, packed and shipped across the UK and Europe.

Last year Amazon invested $60 billion across Europe to grow its operations on the continent, and it has ambitious goals for improving delivery times. It’s growing Amazon Now ultra-fast delivery to 20-plus sites in the UK, and it’s accelerating same-day delivery by adding more than 25 sites across Europe this year.

“When we make delivery faster, we are not just moving boxes quicker,” said Mariangela Marseglia, vice president of Amazon European Stores, speaking at the London event. “We are giving people minutes, hours back.” 

Faster delivery, she added, comes from working safer and smarter. This is where the robots come in.

To hit its delivery goals in Europe, Amazon is investing more than $10 billion to expand and modernize its fulfillment network with robotics across the continent over the next few years. Some of the robotics systems it’s putting in place have been built on suggestions made by Amazon employees, said Armin Cossman, the company’s vice president of operations for Europe.

A new system called Stark, for example, was the idea of an Amazon operations employees in Spain. It picks up huge crates from conveyer belts and places them onto trolleys – repetitive work that puts an enormous amount of strain on the human body. Stark is being piloted in Barcelona, but Amazon plans to bring it to at least 15 more sites across Europe by the end of 2027.

It’s the first successful deployment of collaborative robots in Amazon’s fulfilment network, said Cossman. “Employees work side by side with collaborative technology – the same space working together on the same process.”

On both of our visits to its sites, Amazon was careful to impress upon us that this human-robot collaboration is a key part of its robotics strategy. The company, which has been repeatedly accused of unsafe work conditions in its warehouses and of looking to replace workers with machines, wanted us to know, and you to know, that its robots aren’t here to take its workers’ jobs – just to make them better.

“When people have a people versus machines mentality, I find that wrong,” said Brady. “I believe that people, when they have technologies as a tool set, that there’s nothing in this world that they can achieve.”

Amazon has upskilled 700,000 workers, he added, with many more to come. He also anticipates the creation of new jobs linked to robotics as Amazon’s portfolio evolves.

“Robots create jobs. Full stop. It’s a fact,” said Paul Miller, vice president and principal analyst at market researcher Forrester. “New jobs are created to maintain the robots, to manage the robots and to do the new work that’s made possible because automation has lowered the cost, improved the consistency or accelerated the delivery of the tasks people once performed.”

Still, some individuals will be adversely affected by the disruption, Miller added. Those people will need to be supported as they change careers to ensure they’re better off.

At LCY3, there were many workers stationed across the 2 million square feet of operating space, spread out across airy halls with natural light flooding in from the Thames-view windows. Many were packing deliveries or unpacking returns, and some were working with and on the robots.

One key role is that of amnesty responder, whose responsibility it is to rescue items that have fallen from the pods the Proteus robots whisk around. Fallen items are the main point of failure in the Proteus system. When something tumbles out of one of the shelving units, the amnesty responder hits a button and the entire ballet pauses to allow the human in the loop to retrieve the offending object. Only once they’ve exited the arena does the dance continue.

On rare occasions, Amazon acknowledged, a collision occurs. Usually this will result in the Proteus needing a new camera lens, courtesy of the mechanic that’s always on hand. Then it’s back to work.

What next for Amazon robotics

Amazon’s robotics capabilities are evolving fast.

Beyond the walls of its fulfillment centers are delivery robots, such as the Amazon Scout and Amazon Prime Air drone. The latter is already live at eight sites across the US. Meanwhile, the company is testing the service in Darlington in the UK.

The MK30 drone can deliver shoebox-sized packages, allowing Amazon to deliver from a range of 60,000 items within a two-hour window. With its six propellors, a redundancy that allows the drone to continue on even if one fails, it will hover above the ground and drop packages without damaging them (it can detect obstacles on the ground).

Meanwhile, today’s robots are the preliminaries for what comes next. No, not humanoids, like in Elon Musk’s fever dreams of swarms of Optimus robots doing factory jobs.

Amazon has more modest expectations, targeting somewhere between what it’s doing with robots today and what humanoids may eventually deliver. That could include merging the capabilities of its mobility (e.g. Proteus) and manipulation (e.g. Sparrow) robots. Dresser said Amazon sees paths to using some combination of those technologies.

“How can we move and manipulate in the same robot, and what does that look like? Because we think that that is where our operations are heading,” Dresser said. “I think we’re going to see some new, interesting form factors in the coming months that are going to be in our warehouses very quickly.”

It’s clearly a company learning in real time – designing robots to meet its specific needs, and then refining them based on how they perform when thrust into real-world situations. “The systems we’re building today,” said Brady, “are laying the foundation for what comes next.”