Little is known about what Amazon is up to with its new, top-secret robotic project.

But that hasn’t stopped people from speculating.

Is Amazon creating Alexa on wheels, an artificial intelligence that can follow you throughout your house, tuning lights on and off, answering your questions and playing music to keep you company?

Or will the robot stake out your front door, wait for deliveries from Amazon and make sure they are secure?

Or maybe it’s something completely different….

Amazon also has to make the robots valuable while making them affordable, said Aaron Steinfeld, an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Steinfeld’s research focuses in part on robots designed to interact with humans.

Robots have to be intelligent, like Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices. Alexa, however, can store its intelligence in the cloud, meaning its devices, like an Amazon Echo or Echo Dot, can use cheaper hardware and keep costs down.
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