Amazon announced a new version of Proteus, its fully autonomous warehouse robot, that accepts task instructions in natural language rather than requiring specialized software and is being piloted in the company’s labs.
The company says the language-capable Proteus can be told tasks in the same way colleagues communicate, and the upgrade expands the robot’s operating area beyond dock zones to “work anywhere items need to be moved,” including transporting containers on arrival, moving them between workstations, and assisting across fulfillment centers and delivery sites.
"You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing," said Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics.
The design largely follows the Proteus introduced in 2022, a tortoise-like, heavy-lifting floor system that moves large carts, and the launch sits alongside Amazon’s broader robotics roadmap, which includes an expanded touch-sensitive robot called Vulcan and a collaborative tote-handling system first piloted in Barcelona.
Amazon says it plans to deploy the new Proteus in Europe during the first half of 2027 and to roll out Vulcan and the tote-handling system to more European sites over the coming year.
