Amazon’s Delivery Bot Seems Lightyears Behind Others We’ve Seen

Last week, we saw a video from Amazon that showed off the ecommerce retailer’s own branded delivery robot. With an ongoing mission to perfect (and control) the coveted last-mile delivery segment, it’s not surprising to see that Amazon is working on something in the autonomous-delivery bot space with this six-wheeled delivery device that they’re affectionately referring to as Scout. But what is surprising, in watching the video and reading a little bit more about the service, is to see just how far behind Amazon is with their delivery tech than other bots we’ve seen.

To it’s credit, Amazon did just launch six of these Scout delivery robots in a suburban Seattle neighborhood. There, the test program involves human employees that follow the bots around while they make deliveries to ensure that they (and their surroundings) remain safe and that the bots do their jobs efficiently. According to Amazon, the bots will deliver Amazon packages Monday through Friday during daylight hours, and they’ll autonomously follow their delivery route.

But it’s the design of the bots themselves that really open things up to a number of questions around just how efficient Scout will be as a delivery robot.