The Amazon Scout devices were created by Amazon, are the size of a small cooler, and roll along sidewalks at a walking pace. The service is in field test mode, currently delivering packages to customers in four states in the U.S., but will continue to expand to more customers.

Our investment in this new Amazon Scout team in Germany, which will consist of dozens of software development engineers and applied scientists, is driven by our partnership with the academic community in Tübingen and made possible by the talented people who live here.

Advancing computer vision in Scout

The team we’re building in Tübingen will work closely with the Amazon Scout research labs in Seattle, U.S. and the new team in Cambridge, U.K. to develop perception systems that process data from various sensors and fuse them into a robust representation of the world around Amazon Scout. In turn, Scout can safely and autonomously navigate around pedestrians, pets, and obstacles found in residential neighborhoods such as recycling bins and road signs.

Das Forschungszentrum in Tübingen
Photo by Bodamer Faber Architekten

We’re now hiring software engineers and applied scientists in the fields of computer vision who are at the forefront of robotics and autonomous systems technology.

Open roles for Amazon Scout in Tübingen are now live on Amazon’s jobs site.

Establishing a new group for Amazon Scout in Tübingen is another example of Amazon's continued investment in Germany. Amazon Scout joins other teams that form Amazon's innovative Tübingen Development Center, which hosts groups focused on other pioneering areas such as explainable AI, causality and how AI systems can comprehend their environments. And, the creation of the Amazon Scout team in Tübingen is in line with our plan to further grow the local development center by hiring highly skilled employees. Across Germany, Amazon has created 20,000 permanent roles, including high skilled jobs in our development centers in Berlin, Aachen, Dresden and Tübingen.

In 2019, we created the Tübingen lablet, a new kind of research team that is dedicated to the open research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications to work on long-term challenges in AI. This team, along with the other research teams in Tübingen, will move into the new Development Center next to the Max Planck Institute. The building will be completed in late 2021 and offer an event space and café for the neighboring research institutions.

Learn more about Amazon Scout.