Honeybee Robotics is an R&D engineering company that has delivered more than 1,000 projects to government and industrial customers in the spacecraft, planetary exploration, defense robotics, medical devices, mining, oil and gas, and utility infrastructure sectors.Īmazon announced its $1 billion Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund in April 2022. While it’s not owned by Amazon, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ sub-orbital spaceflight company, acquired Honeybee Robotics for an undisclosed amount in January 2022. Earlier in 2021, iRobot introduced its H1 handheld vacuum, its first non-robotics product. It acquired Aeris Cleantec AG, a Switzerland-based developer of air purifiers, in November 2021 for $72 million. IRobot will certainly expand Amazon’s consumer robotics portfolio, although iRobot has recently been diversifying its portfolio with non-robotics products. The robot can be used for home monitoring, video conferencing and entertaining children. In September 2021, Amazon unveiled Astro, essentially an Echo Show 10 on wheels. IRobot isn’t the company’s first venture into household robotics. If the deal closes, it will be Amazon’s fourth biggest acquisition ever. DispatchĪmazon plans to acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion, over double what it paid for Kiva Systems, at $61 per share in an all-cash transaction. It does similar tasks as the Kiva robots, but can work freely around Amazon workers instead of caged off areas. Kiva’s automated guided vehicles (AGVs) use computerized barcode stickers on the floor to navigate Amazon’s warehouses.Īmazon Robotics recently announced its first autonomous mobile robot (AMR), Proteus. Kiva initially continued to provide mobile robots to its existing customers, but that quickly came to an end. At the time, it was Amazon’s second-largest acquisition ever. Amazon acquired the mobile robot company in 2012 for $775 million. It’s impossible to talk about Amazon’s history in robotics without talking about Kiva Systems. Here’s a look at the company’s robotics acquisitions and some of its investments and notable robots developed internally.
While completion of the transaction is still subject to customary closing conditions, the deal expands Amazon’s already extensive robotics portfolio. Supporting the Growth of AGVs and AMRs in the WarehouseĪ decade after Amazon made its first foray into robotics with its acquisition of Kiva Systems, the e-commerce giant is acquiring iRobot for $1.7 billion.