Gadgetory

when you think of personal robots the first thing that comes to mind might be something like this from science fiction or it might look more like this this is misty - and it's from a company called misty robotics who want to put one of these robots in every home in office it can be anything from a security robot to a friendly companion to keep an eye on your elderly relatives when voice assistance like the Amazon echo first hit the market no one was really sure what we'd use them for beyond setting alarms or playing music fast-forward to today and we're ordering groceries or even controlling appliances with our voice here Siri close the shades but misty wants to be more than just a voice assistant her creators see her more like Rosie from the Jetsons who was a real part of the family we got to see misty Bing built and get a sneak peek into the future of home robots misty has a range of sensors to detect obstacles and it can map rooms in 2d and 3d with depth sensors you can say hymnist II can you go to the living room and she knows how to get there there's also a high resolution camera which we use for computer vision so for things like face recognition we go up to misty she knows who you are I'm gonna take you through a demo that misty calls receptionist I'm gonna register my face on misty and then she is gonna take me to the person that I'm visiting in this case in so here we go hi misty are you view to see so I will show you to them your visitor is here Thank You misty programmable robots aren't exactly new and there's growing competition in the home robot space Amazon's rumored to be making a home robot powered by Alexa while the likes of Buddy peppa and Curie can do many of the things misty does misty robotics is a spinoff from Spiro the company that brought bb-8 and r2d2 to life so it's no surprise that misty is pretty cute and personality is one of the ways that misty is hoping to set itself apart it's actually one of the hardest parts of the robot because it's not you know especially when we have a bunch of engineers sitting around creating a personality isn't maybe what comes naturally to us like we went through probably 200 different iterations of different types of eyes to find just the right ones so you can kind of look at misty and understand how she's feeling eventually misty will be able to respond to different inputs like your facial expression or the tone of your voice and adapt based on these cues it's like going to a pet adoption center where there's like the ones that are like super outgoing and come up and jump around and then there's like you know the puppies that are like in the back and there's more shy and you really find the one that connects with you like eventually we think robots are gonna have those sort of personalities and as you're interacting with them they're changing at the moment part of that personality is showing through Misty's expressions and sounds even if you've never seen a line of code before it's easy to program the robot using blockly I got misty to roll forward deliver a cup of coffee and make a sound misty is modular so you can attach a trailer or swap out components like the arms for cup holders the Arduino back pack powers lots of different projects like this touch screen so you can feasibly 3d print almost anything misty and it would work once you had it basically plugged in yep absolutely what's the craziest thing that you've seen so far I mean I love the LED mohawk that's probably the craziest one future versions will add to this modular concept the misty 3 might even be able to pick things up and move them around for now misty is really targeted to developers and students whether or not people find a use for home robots in general remains to be seen especially if they end up costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars misty 2 is set for release in December 2018