Amazon’s new Proteus robot takes plain language orders, heading to Europe by 2027
The pitch for Amazon’s new robot is that you talk to it. At its “Delivering the future” event at the Dartford fulfillment center in east London on June 4, Amazon unveiled the next-generation Proteus that takes instructions in simple language, no technical instructions and a programming interface, and plans to invest more than €10bn (about $11.6bn) in its European fulfillment network in the coming years.
The interface is a topic change. “You tell it what to do. It calculates the priority, the route, the time,” said Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, describing the robot as an assistant in the movement of physical objects.
Where the current Proteus, deployed in 25 US locations, only works in dock areas with carts weighing around 400kg, the new version is designed to work anywhere in a filling or delivery area, transporting containers as they arrive and move them between work areas.
Not posted yet. The next-generation Proteus is being tested in Amazon’s labs, and European shipments are scheduled for the first half of 2027.
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This timeline juxtaposes two other projects Amazon is expanding across the region: STARK, an interactive toy robot that began testing in Barcelona and is slated to reach 15 European sites by 2027, and Vulcan, the company’s first touch-sensitive robot, which moved from Spokane, Washington to its Hamburg facility in Germany.
Money is a big commitment. Amazon has planned the robots as one part of a plan to invest more than 10 billion euros to modernize European fulfillment, and said it will increase its workforce in European fulfillment centers by 25,000 in the coming years.
That statistic is the company’s answer, mentioned earlier, to an open question about automation and jobs, consistent with its claim that robots have created new categories of work in reliability, maintenance, and engineering.
Robots come bundled with push-speed push. Amazon said it would open delivery sites in less than 25 days across Europe this year, including Britain and Germany, and expand Amazon Now, its flagship superfast service, to Manchester and Birmingham.
Same-day grocery delivery, it said, has now reached more than 2,300 US cities and parts of Tokyo, with further expansion planned. Its next-generation assistant, Alexa+, is expected to launch in 10 more countries by 2027.
The money spent remains within the largest. In February, Amazon predicted a more than 50% jump in capital spending to $200bn this year, including its peers in building AI-driven infrastructure.
On the contrary, the 10 billion euros to be fulfilled in Europe is something of a regional line instead of a topic, but it is a part with a face in it: a robot, in 2027, an Amazon employee in Dartford or Hamburg is designed to be able to command it by simply telling it what to do. Whether it performs as smoothly in the real estate as it does in the lab is what the 2027 release will really test.
