Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has shown off the company’s latest robotic machine – a giant robot suit – at a top secret event.
Although it’s unlikely we’ll ever see the creation on the market, it certainly helped Bezos’ dreams come true as he entered the stage within the 13-foot (4m) tall robot.
“Why do I feel so much like Sigourney Weaver?” he said, according to attendees at the conference, referring to the 1986 classic Aliens film.
The suit, called Method-2, was created with the help of Hankook Mirae Technology and Bezos was seen controlling the robot’s giant limbs, even though it was tethered with chains to stop it going rogue.
The robotic suit first made an appearance online last year, although sceptics thought the video was a fake, saying there’s no way the robot would be able to walk around.
The robot’s maker, robotics expert Vitaly Bulgarov said the robot could potentially solve real-world problems, although it’s not exactly sure what its abilities are. Some thoughts include entering unsafe environments such as war zones, unstable radioactive sites or where natural disasters have occurred.
It could also be used to fix buildings that are at risk of falling down, nuclear reactors or other places where sending a human in could be too dangerous.
Bulgarov has created a whole range of robots for films including Transformers, Robocop and Terminator, although this particular robot probably has a lot more up its sleeve than the animatronic models used in those films.
Jeff Bezos was one of the keynote speakers at the Machine Learning Automation, Robotics and Space Exploration (MARS) conference. The company sponsors the event, but it’s not clear how Amazon will use the suit, or, in fact, if it is working with Hankook Mirae Technology in any other robotic capacity.
