Building the world's largest robotic network | Amazon's Emily Vetterick

Devin sits down with Emily Vetterick, Director of Product, Program, and Ops at Amazon Industrial Robotics, whose career has taken her from assembling aircraft at Boeing to scaling drone delivery at Prime Air. She now oversees the world's largest fleet of mobile robots, totaling over one million, and shares how Amazon designs for a world where humans and robots share the same physical space.

She walks Devin through the design challenges behind Proteus, Amazon's autonomous mobile robot, from giving it eyes that signal intent to dialing in an acoustic chirp that works for a fleet without sounding like, as a colleague once put it, a bog full of frogs. Along the way, Emily reflects on a career-defining lesson she learned watching mechanics join a 767 at 2am: that the best design insights come from listening to the people actually doing the work.

Time Stamps:

2:09 Lessons from the Boeing night shift

3:37 Customer trust and listening

6:38 Customer-first drone design

8:16 The “beehive ballet”

10:31 Meet Amazon’s mobile robots

13:13 Shreveport facility tour

15:40 Proteus’ human robot signals

24:15 AI for fleet and design

30:37 Lightning round 

Links

Devin Liddell on LinkedIn

Emily Vetterick

Teague

About the Host: Futurist Devin Liddell

Devin Liddell is the Principal Futurist at Teague. With over two decades of experience in innovation and design strategy, Devin has worked with industry giants like Boeing, Intel, and Nike, helping organizations anticipate changes across both near- and far-term horizons to create their preferred futures. Devin is a frequent contributor to Fast Company. 

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