Amazon released AWS RoboMaker today, a new cloud service that provides a central cloud development environment for all your robot needs. It essentially runs on top of the Robot Operating System, providing easy hooks into other AWS services, while providing a single place to test, simulate and deploy apps directly to robots.
I don’t know how big the market is for this, but makes total sense for Amazon. Looking at the integrations, and providing a dev space for robotics applications also turns them into possible ingest machines for further AWS services. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and Amazon Rekognition can turn any video into actionable intelligence. Amazon Lex capability means that you could be talking to your robots like you would to Alexa. Oddly, I’m a little weirded out that Amazon Polly service will be available for speech generation as well…
But having a central place to design, test, and deploy applications makes total sense in other areas of IT, so I image that also applies to robotics. Weirdly this means that robots can now be edge devices.
Right now the service will be limited to US East, US West, and EU (Ireland), but expect more regions soon.
Source: Amazon
