Anki Cozmo Robot – The Liveliest Toy Robot Ever
Anki, the futuristic robotic toy manufacturer after making a sensational hit with AI enabled and iPhone controlled overdrive race cars, came up with a new robot toy named Cozmo. Cozmo is an intelligent, playful and almost sentient toy creature that can behave as though it is aware of the surrounding people and the environment. For the San Francisco-based company it has come as a great result from years of consistent effort.
The company reportedly worked on as many as 45 different versions of this intelligent toy spanning over more than 4 years. It is truly the coolest and loveliest robot toy that we have ever seen to have a personality and perception of its own.
The Brain Behind Cozmo
The development team of Anki put their efforts visualizing a possibility that emotional engagement is possible with an animated and lively CGI character and finally, with Cozmo they brought it to the physical world. Yes, you can really feel it like a small pet, not just an intelligent machine, because it has a personality.
It is Cool to Play with
Let me begin with something that shows how it behaves in a humane fashion. You plug it in a charging dock and you can see the cube-like head of Cozmo is bobbing up and down just in the way we snore and take a breath when sleeping. Moreover, the animated eyes of Anki’s new robot are closed on the small screen. That is the beauty of Cozmo.
You can wake up Cozmo with the connected iPhone using the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. But all its smart behavior apart, the real brain of Cozmo is in the connected smartphone app that runs it. It can sense danger like falling from a height. For example, when rolling over the table it would come to a standstill when coming at the edge of the table. From its apprehensive stances, responsiveness and awareness in situations the nearly human way of behaving is easily evident and for a toy that is a cool thing to play and amuse with.
Lively and Fun-packed
- Cozmo offers a maverick real-time combination of emotional response, animation and personality attribute making it livelier than most other AI enabled little toy robots.
- The principal sensor of this robot is utilized for mainly vision sensing.
- Cozmo has a camera inside the block head and it is located just underneath the LED eyes allowing seeing objects around it.
It is capable of differentiating human faces from other objects. After showing your face to it for first time recognition just enter your name to the iPhone app when you are asked to do so and Cozmo can utter your name instantly. From this moment on it would remember you and all the interactions you had with it.
What is so Special about it?
Most interesting thing about Cozmo is that it remains always on the move and all of its moves look tremendously funny. It always looks to engage seems with its surrounding in a funny way. In one way to express, this is a sheer imitation of life but with a certain comic aura around it. Even the LED lights on the block head that serve as the eyes continue to offer a lot of funny expressions and responsive emotions. This typical animated personality of Cozmo makes it stand out from most other serious robots that are on the market now.
Price & Availability
If you want to play with Cozmo and make it your funny pet or digital buddy, you have to gurgle out $179 and it is going to be shipped from October, this year. At present, the product design of Cozmo is finished but the development team at Anki is working on the software to fine-tune certain things.
The Bottom Line
Reportedly, they are using Maya, one of the most popular software platforms for film animation. That means the end product can actually be loaded with lot more animated effects than we have envisaged so far. Wait for the time to say aloud ‘Wow’ to Cozmo!
Nisarg is the Business Development Manager at Nimblechapps, a top mobile game development company and has been with the organisation since its inception in 2014. He likes to update his knowledge on changing trends in technology and marketing and pens his thoughts regarding the same on various blogs and LinkedIn.