Amazon.com Inc will stop live tests of its automated delivery robot "Amazon Scout", a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Thursday, after the US retailer realised the programme did not completely meet its customers' needs.
The company is now scaling back or "reorienting" the programme, and it will work with the involved employees to match them to other open roles within the organisation, Amazon spokesperson Alisa Carroll said, adding that it was not abandoning the project altogether.
Amazon started testing the fully-electric Scout, which is of the size of a small cooler and rolled along the sidewalks at a walking pace, in Washington state in 2019 before expanding to Southern California, Georgia and Tennessee.
