Amazon Scout: a sidewalk delivery robot that stopped after four years of tests

A blue robot the size of a cooler

Amazon unveiled Scout, a sidewalk delivery robot, on 23 January 2019. It was a bright blue, six-wheeled electric robot about the size of a small cooler that moved at walking pace. The first test began with six units in Snohomish County, Washington. The robots ran on weekdays in daylight, at first with an employee walking alongside. Scout was a field test rather than a product, and some Prime orders were assigned to it at random. It built on technology from Dispatch, a robotics startup Amazon acquired in 2017.

Pandemic expansion, then cuts in 2022

Testing spread to Irvine, California in August 2019, and to Atlanta, Georgia and Franklin, Tennessee in July 2020, when Amazon presented Scout as a contactless way to deliver during the pandemic. In 2021 it opened a Scout development centre in Helsinki. In October 2022 Amazon announced it was ending the field tests and reorienting the program. About 400 people had worked on Scout, and Amazon said it would match them to other open roles. In the same period Amazon wound down other new ventures and froze hiring in retail.

A test with few residents’ voices on record

Little public feedback from residents exists. Amazon said the response in Irvine was positive, and Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers said: “We are delighted to welcome Amazon Scout into our community.” Sean Scott, the vice president in charge, said in 2019: “We're still in field test mode.” When it ended the tests, Amazon said: “During our limited field test for Scout, we worked to create a unique delivery experience, but learned through feedback that there were aspects of the program that weren't meeting customers' needs.” Bloomberg reported that the current version of the robot wasn’t working. Amazon had held community meet-and-greets only months earlier.

An experiment cut first when costs came down

Scout stayed in testing for almost four years. Amazon never disclosed how many robots it ran or how many deliveries they made. Experiments with no revenue are easy to cut when a company trims costs. Starship, which kept running paid deliveries on university campuses, offers a contrast.

When the test ends, how does this robot show why it should stay?

What we haven’t confirmed

• The total number of robots built, and their dimensions, speed and payload
• An official count of affected employees, and what happened to the Helsinki centre
• The exact start date of the Atlanta and Franklin tests
• What the “reoriented” program became