Amazon is developing a new simulation called Alexa Arena to acquire data on how humans interact with robots.

Alexa Arena provides a variety of multi-room layouts and interactable objects, for the creation of human-robot interaction (HRI) missions.

Qiaozi Gao, applied scientist of the Amazon Alexa AI team, describes Alexa Arena as an initiative supporting the development of gamified robotic tasks readily accessible to general human users.

The game will feature “user-friendly” graphics and control mechanisms, with a recent paper submitted by Gao and his team claiming that the game will open a new venue for high-efficiency HRI data collection and Embodied AI system evaluation.

Embodied AI relates to AI systems which control a physical object, such as a robotic arm or autonomous vehicle.

The paper added that Alexa Arena will be made publicly available to facilitate research in building generalisable and assistive embodied agents such as virtual assistants and robots.

Alexa Arena will likely support Amazon’s continued development of robotics in its warehouses.

The company recently launched a new robotic system which can move individual products before they are put into packaging and sent out to customers.

At the time of the launch, Amazon said the robotic arm would take on repetitive tasks allowing employees to focus on other tasks.

Share Story: