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Amazon just killed its newest robot. Here’s what went wrong.
Amazon’s Blue Jay warehouse robot was pitched as a faster path to same-day delivery. Instead, it got grounded almost as soon as it touched the floor.
According to Business Insider, Amazon shelved the ceiling-mounted system in January and reassigned team members who worked on the initiative. The move is a reminder that warehouse robotics lives and dies on cost, complexity, and whether it can scale beyond a test site.
In an October post announcing Blue Jay, Amazon described it as a ceiling-mounted, multi-armed system designed to pick, stow, and consolidate items in a single workspace.
Amazon said it was being tested at a facility in South Carolina and could handle roughly 75% of the types of items stored there, framing Blue Jay as “core technology” intended to support Same-Day sites over time.
People familiar with the project pointed to cost, manufacturing complexity, and implementation challenges as key factors behind the decision to shelve Blue Jay, and said the project’s staff were reassigned to other robotics efforts, according to Business Insider.
Those same constraints are showing up across logistics, from AI warehouse tech funding to consolidation plays like AI-fueled ecommerce fulfillment.
Business Insider also reported that Amazon is shifting away from an older same-day warehouse model known internally as “Local Vending Machine” (LVM) toward a modular approach called “Orbital,” designed to be easier to deploy and scale.
Amazon expects to carry forward elements of Blue Jay’s underlying technology into other projects, including a floor-mounted system internally referred to as “Flex Cell,” and the first Orbital-based same-day warehouse is not expected to open until 2027. The longer arc of robotics progress is also tracking toward more reusable intelligence, like the same brain for robots idea.
Also read: Amazon’s shifting priorities are also visible in the recent Washington state job cuts.
