https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/28/why-amazon-built-a-home-robot/

iRobot’s CEO once told me, with a wink, that he didn’t become a truly successful roboticist until he became a vacuum salesman. It’s a good line, and one that betrays some fundamental truths about the industry. Robots are hard, and in a lot of ways home robots are doubly so.

That no one has managed to crack the code beyond the wild success of robotic vacuums like the Roomba is not for lack of trying. To date, it’s largely been the realm of startups like Anki and Jibo (or the rare exception of the Bosch-created Kuri), but today, Amazon announced that it’s throwing its own tremendous resources behind the problem.