Building Amazon Astro: The First Multi-Purpose Home Robot

Ken Washington, CTO of Ford, discusses the responsible development of AI and its potential to benefit society in a conference presentation.

• Developers should be responsible and focus on doing good when working with AI
• AI has the potential to benefit society, such as in home robots that provide companionship and peace of mind
• Ford is providing a software development kit for Astro, their home robot, to university partners to accelerate innovation
• Working in AI is important for society and provides opportunities for learning and growth

Ken Washington emphasizes the responsibility that comes with being an artificial intelligence technologist and the importance of developing AI in a way that benefits society. He encourages developers to focus on doing good and to keep an eye towards diversity. Washington also discusses the potential for AI to improve people's lives, such as in home robots that provide companionship and peace of mind. Ford is providing a software development kit for Astro, their home robot, to university partners to accelerate innovation. Working in AI provides opportunities for learning and growth and is important for society.

Over the past couple of years, the consumer robotic market has seen rapid adoption due to the pandemic and dropping prices, and the market is expected to grow at a CAGR of almost 31% through 2027. Last year, Amazon announced Astro, a new household robot for home monitoring that combined AI, computer vision, sensor technology, and voice and edge computing. Astro brought new advances to the consumer robotic market around human-robot interaction and multimodal AI. In this fireside chat, Dr. Ken Washington, VP of Software Engineering for Consumer Robotics, will discuss scaling robotics at Amazon and new features in Astro that are novel in the areas of computer vision, perception training, and mapping. Dr. Washington is joined by Vijay Karunamurthy, Head of Engineering at Scale AI, to discuss the future of robotics at Amazon and the new AI technologies evolving with consumer robotics. Before joining Amazon, Dr. Washington was CTO at Ford Motor Company, where his portfolio included propulsion systems, sustainable and advanced materials, additive manufacturing, next-gen vehicle architectures, controls, and automated systems. Dr. Washington also served as Lockheed Martin Corporation’s first chief privacy officer and as CIO for Sandia National Laboratories. In addition to his election to the NAE in 2020, he received the 2012 Black Engineer of the Year Award in Research Leadership.