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

Twitter/JeffBezos

Looks like Amazon’s invite-only MARS conference in Palm Springs 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 companies like Stanford School of Medicine, 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 who it belonged to.

But the event wasn’t exactly a secret. People were tweeting out various 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 locale, 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 KiroVan tractor and 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 which plans to let people take flights into outer space.

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

Dave Limp, the Amazon SVP behind Alexa opened the show with a keynote. But the highlight was when Bezos piloted a 13-foot robot from Hankook Mirae Technology, the world’s first manned bi-pedal robot.

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 computerized ways to grow food.) Other people got to try out this robot, too.

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