Amazon’s Next-Gen Proteus Robot Now Takes Everyday Orders and Handles the Heavy Loads

Warehouse teams just gained a robot that responds to normal conversation instead of rigid commands. Amazon unveiled their next-gen Proteus this week during its Delivering the Future event near London. The machine still looks much like the original model from 2022, a low, rounded platform built to slide across warehouse floors and push big carts filled with goods.

Workers merely tell the robot, either verbally or on a keyboard, what has to be shifted, and it calculates the sequence, selects the most direct route, and paces itself to avoid bottlenecks, with no additional training necessary. It acts as a personal assistant that is already familiar with the setup and can react in real time when you assign it a task. At its core, it continues to undertake physical labor. Proteus, in particular, specializes in delivering full carts weighing up to approximately 400 kg over long distances within fulfillment centers or to delivery areas. It greets containers as they arrive, carts them between stations, and takes over when humans become fatigued by repeated transport duties. Previous versions were primarily limited to the docked areas, however this one includes the full site.

It has built-in safety measures like sensors, illumination, and careful navigation near humans. Some versions even include basic moving eyes that notify to nearby workers when they are about to move. We believe that by not overburdening personnel with large loads or constant walking, they will be able to focus on more skilled activities like verifying things, making quality calls, and other tasks that require a human eye.

Amazon is merging new Proteus models with two other technologies that are also starting to be used in Europe: Vulcan, which utilizes touch sensing to choose items from limited bins, and STARK, which performs accurate toting next to human colleagues. It’s all about getting robots to do physically difficult or repetitive work while people handle oversight and issue resolution. This enhanced Proteus is set to be released in European centers in the first half of 2027. It is now being evaluated in a controlled laboratory environment. This will allow engineers enough time to fine-tune how spoken instructions work in the real world, where there is continual background noise, foot traffic, and shifting priorities. This deployment is part of a wider 10-billion-euro initiative to modernize fulfillment in the region over the coming years.

Amazon forecasts that this rollout will support the creation of around 25,000 new fulfillment jobs in Europe, the majority of which will be connected to keeping the robots functioning via maintenance, engineering, and reliability tasks. They claim that their robotics investments have resulted in hundreds of thousands of additional hires around the world, but they have also had to cut positions in other sectors of the business.