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Jeff Bezos has long wanted a robot for the House. Already before 2017, the founder of Amazon – great science fiction fan – had repeatedly asked the engineers and company executives about the feasibility of such a project, says Ken Kiraly, vice president of Amazon who helped create the Kindle.
Then, in 2017, the Amazon team for special projects felt that the right time had finally come to start building a home robot, given the maturity reached by artificial intelligence (Ai) and robotics, the drop in costs of sensors and chips for computers and the risk that the company’s competitors have similar projects in the pipeline. The team got to work despite the presence of a big unknown, that is what the Amazon home robot would do. “Robots are complex – explains Kiraly, who put together the team for the project -. At that time we didn’t know what the usefulness would be [del robot, ndr]but as we knew it would take some time to get there, we told ourselves we had to get started“.
Start uphill
The result was Star, a cute two-wheeled robot the size of a bowling ball with a touchscreen instead of a face and a small periscope to scan the table tops. Astro is able to automatically map a house thanks to his sensors and browse around avoiding obstacles, people and pets. Users also have the ability to access the robot and control it remotely. However, how underlined give her early reviews not really stellar, It is still unclear why anyone would want this car around the house. Amazon suggests that Astro can help you keep an eye on your home from a distance, since she can recognize people, or set off an alarm and send a notification when she runs into a stranger. It’s a nice idea, but not exactly an announced success.
Despite the lukewarm reception reserved for Astro, Amazon remains faithful to its project. On a recent visit to the Lab126, the division of the company responsible for the development of hardware, Kiraly and some of his colleagues pointed out that Amazon is still adamant that robots for the home will one day catch on. They described how these devices are an effective way for Amazon to get closer to hers main objective: to anticipate every desire and need of its customers. “Astro is our first robot, it won’t be the last“said Ken Washington, general manager of Amazon Consumer Robotics and head of the Astro project.
New features
At Lab126, Amazon unveiled a new function publicly announced during the virtual showcase dedicated to the company’s hardware, which allows the robot to recognize when a door or window in the house is left open and notify the owner. The update certainly doesn’t make Astro a suddenly unmissable product, but at its core is Ai technology that could allow the robot to learn several useful things about a user’s home by looking around and getting some instructions.
Activating the new feature requires a person to accompany Astro on a tour of the house, pointing the robot to doors and windows and speaking out phrases such as “front door” to teach him how to refer to them in his future notices. The robot uses a artificial intelligence model trained on both text and imagessimilar to those used to generate Ai art.
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