In fact, Amazon tells me that they had to introduce sound a la an electric car, so you know when it’s cruising around the house. Though the robot itself is surprisingly quiet (it’s no robotic vacuucm). There are a pair of speakers on-board, as well. The screen also supports Amazon’s new Visual ID facial recognition to personalize interactions with Astro. The screen moves on its own and can be manually tilted 60 degrees for a better look. The robot can be summoned with a “Astro,” but when you need to converse more directly, that requires an “Alexa,” at which point, the familiar voice assistant takes over.īeyond offering some personality, Astro’s 10-inch touchscreen face also serves as a standard Echo Show display, so you can do things like watch a movie, teleconference and control your smart home. This is augmented by the occasional bleeps and bloops, which bring to mind the aforementioned Star Wars droids. They blink and dart around from time to time, but they’re nowhere near as expressive as what Anki hired a team of ex Pixar and Dreamworks animators to create with Cozmo. Its face, which is effectively a screen or a tablet, sports a pair of minimalist eyes - like a set of lowercase, bolded letter “o”s. The robot’s primary personality is best described as something akin to R2-D2/BB8 or Wall-E. I had the opportunity to interact with Astro last week, and the robot’s got a bit of a dual personality, from that perspective. Other in-house technologies did factor in, however, including Ring’s security monitoring and various Alexa and home technologies, built into the robot, which features Amazon’s smart assistant. But Amazon insists that the new SLAM system was built from the ground up, and while it considered making robotic startup acquisitions, it ultimately didn’t do so in order to build Astro. Most notably, the company acquired Canvas, a fully autonomous warehouse cart startup, in 2019. That last bit struck me as particularly surprising, given not just how complex an undertaking it is (it’s something iRobot has effectively been iterating on for a decade), but also given some of the robotic technologies Amazon currently houses. Ultimately, Amazon said it had to build many of Astro’s components from scratch - including, most notably, the SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) system it uses to map and navigate the home. But the company’s existing robotics are industrial and primarily focused on getting packages delivered in the least amount of time possible. That started us thinking about it, and by the end we were saying, ‘jeez, does anybody think we won’t have robotics in the home in five to 10 years?’ ”Īmazon Robotics - which began in 2012 with the company’s acquisition of Kiva Systems - formed a sounding board for the consumer team’s ideas. We have a lot of experience using robotics in our fulfillment center, of course, but we thought about what could you do for the consumer in the home to make things more convenient or provide more peace of mind.
“How has robotics changed to make it maybe possible for consumers. “We talked about AI, computer vision and processing power, and one of the topics that came up was robotics,” Amazon VP Charlie Tritschler tells TechCrunch.
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The company begun work on the robot roughly four years ago, leveraging different Amazon departments to build a fully realized home robot.
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Per Amazon’s press materials,Īstro will cost $1,449.99, but as part of the Day 1 Editions program, it will be available for an introductory price of $999.99 and include a free six-month trial of Ring Protect Pro. The price, however, is set to go up quickly. It’s also the most expensive, with a price tag of $999. Astro is, far and away, the most ambitious device to be launched with the program, which has thus far included things like a receipt printer and smart Cuckoo clock. The new robot, which shares a name with the Jetsons dog, a track on the White Stripes debut and major league baseball team in Houston, will be available on a limited basis later this year. Previously Amazon has used the platform in a manner akin to Kickstarter or Indiegogo, where customers effectively vote with their preorders. The product is taking its first baby steps to market as part of Amazon’s Day One Edition program. The company just announced its first robot, Astro.
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