Tech

Amazon threw another invite-only robot conference in Palm Springs last week

Julie Bort

2017-03-28T04:22:32Z

Looks as if Amazon's invite-only MARS conference in Palm Springs, California, is now an annual tradition. Last week, Amazon threw another event, according to photographer Ric Miller, who lives next to the hotel where the event took place and took some photos for us.

MARS stands for Machine learning, home Automation, Robotics, and Space exploration.

Miller, an IT consultant who has worked for Stanford University's medical school, got wind of the event when he saw a Blue Origin rocket sticking up over the hotel's hedge. He immediately recognized what it was and whom it belonged to.

But the event wasn't exactly a secret. People were tweeting out pictures, mostly of the robots.

According to someone who works for the upscale Parker Hotel, in Palm Springs, the conference lasted three days and Amazon booked out the whole resort.

Amazon held MARS 2016 a year ago at the same place, where 130 invitees from tech and Hollywood showed up. The event included a fireside chat with author Dan Brown and director Ron Howard.

Here's what we could see of this year's conference.

Guests arrived in a convoy of black limo vans.

Here's the powerful KiraVan tractor trailer entering the resort. It features a diesel generator as well as solar power to support living spaces with connected TVs and appliances and ...

... an office that includes computers and a mobile network.

One of the stars of the shows was a Blue Origin rocket. Blue Origin is Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' rocket company that plans to fly customers into outer space.

Here's a closer look at the Blue Origin rocket.

Dave Limp, the Amazon senior vice president behind Alexa, opened the show with a keynote. But the highlight was when Bezos piloted a 13-foot robot from Hankook Mirae Technology.

Bezos tweeted this picture about it.

Here's a video of Bezos in that robot tweeted out by attendee Caleb Harper of MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture Initiative. (Harper is working on computerized ways to grow food.) Other people got to try out this robot, too.

@JeffBezos "Why do I feel so much like #sigourneyweaver ?" @amazon #MARS2017 #openpodbaydoors 😬🤓 pic.twitter.com/HRRzmQtZbh
— Caleb Harper (@calebgrowsfood) March 20, 2017

Agility Robotics showed off its advanced robot leg, too. Here's a video tweeted out by attendee Sasha Hoffman, the chief operating officer of the Piaggio Fast Forward robotics unit.

Cassie from @agilityrobotics is the most advanced robot leg I've seen -truly incredible. I can already imagine 1,000 use cases. #mars2017 pic.twitter.com/Kl4F0qe364
— Sasha Hoffman (@sashaphoffman) March 20, 2017

This year, like last year, Kiva robots served food and drinks. These are the robots that run Amazon warehouses made by Kiva Systems, the company Amazon bought for $775 million. Last year, Bezos was spotted drinking single malt whiskey with some of the attendees.

Last year, a robot called NABiROS roamed the party too. NABiROS stands for Non-Anthropomorphic Bipedal Robotic System and was built by the robotics team at UCLA. Other demos were done by the HyQ quadruped robot and the MIT Cheetah robot.

This is how much Bezos topped himself over last year: In 2016, he showed up onstage wearing a robotic suit. This year, he showed up suited in an actual robot.

This isn't the first invitation-only event held by Amazon, according to Bloomberg. It also does an event called Campfire for authors once a year in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Source: Bloomberg

Amazon Jeff Bezos