Amazon unveiled Astro at the Amazon event; Astro is an Alexa-enabled home robot that can roll around the house and use Amazon's virtual assistant wherever it is

Astro is also designed to intelligently monitor your home while you are away and can send Astro remotely to check on specific rooms, people, and objects With the right accessories, this robot can even bring you a drink or throw treats to your dog

Click here for all the information Amazon has announced about Astro, including release date, price, and all the features of this robot

Astro is part of Amazon's Day 1 Edition program, where early invitees can purchase it on Amazon for $999 After that, Astro will be $1,499

According to Amazon, the Astro will begin shipping in limited quantities to customers later this year

Amazon Astro is a small, three-wheeled robot that stands about a foot off the ground The two front wheels are rather large, and there is a third wheel at the rear for stability It is mostly white with black accents in places

On the front of the Astro is a display that appears to be about 10 inches The display, which has a built-in camera, is mounted on a rotating pedestal so that it can be angled to face the person speaking

On the front of the display are two "eyes" that wink and blink This, combined with some movement of the display itself, gives Astro a bit of character and helps to make it look less like a surveillance camera on wheels

Even more clever is the periscope, which rises to 42 inches, allowing you to get a good look at things higher up, like whether someone left the stove on or left their keys on the counter

The Astro weighs about 20 pounds and can move about a meter per second; there is a small cup holder on the back of the Astro that can be used to pass drinks to others in the house This comes in very handy on game day [For example, everything you can do with the Amazon Echo Show 10, you can also do with the Astro Listen to music, play movies, look up recipes, etc Not surprisingly, Astro works with drop-ins so you can chat with friends and family on video calls The robot can even follow you around while you chat

You can also use a smartphone app to move Astro around the house so you can check on him remotely while you are away You can also set up Astro to patrol your home at night or when you are not home It can also send alerts if it sees someone it doesn't recognize

Like the new Amazon Echo Show 15, Astro has a Visual ID so it can be trained to recognize specific family members Data is stored on the robot, not in the cloud

Astro owners can set off-limits areas that they do not want the robot to enter and can disable these devices with physical buttons on the microphone and camera

Like the Ring Always Home Cam, the Amazon Astro is an ambitious smart home device, bordering on clever and creepy; Astro's relatively small size, coupled with its "personality," makes it much more approachable than larger household robots

Amazo is a "smart home device

As Amazon noted during the event, Astro is the first of many household robots that will appear in the future Like its name in The Jetsons, Astro is a harbinger of things to come

For more of our thoughts, here are three reasons to buy the Amazon Astro and three reasons to skip it