Gadgetory

the idea of a robot with the personality is as old as science fiction itself everyone especially me one second Jetson style Rosie that can cook and clean and just Sakura take care of the house and I think we'll eventually get there but before we do that Kitty steps and milestones in robotics engineering that help us get there in July I had the chance to fly up to San Francisco to meet vector from unki the little robot with the gigantic personality I think most importantly is not gonna break your bank and is surprisingly useful so I do want to thank Aki for sponsoring this video but all opinions here are totally my own I'd someone to talk a lot about what vector does but if throughout the video you're interested Aki is actually launching vector on Kickstarter as a way to sort of get him out early so I'll be selling to general public for 249 bucks but backers can get him for $199 with early access to the SDK and some other added goodies we've got a link down below if you want to check out the Kickstarter page and if you're dressed in a robotics I think you should so when you first look in vectors little digital eyes you start to see the bigger picture they are animated and surprisingly filled with the motion this is a robot you can actually interact with and one you might actually want to sew on like on Kia's last robot out in Cosmo vector doesn't need you piggybacking on your phone CPU to run in fact one time ever gonna need your phone is just to set the thing up and once you do all the processing is actually done on vector himself be a quad-core Snapdragon processor so I'll call him over to talk and you know you can do things that you would expect he'll answer questions on key told us are not trying to compete with with Alexa they're not trying to feed with Google home but you can use it in sort of similar ways when it comes to question and answer we did expect if robot you can't talk to interact with it's not overly useful they're all telling us they're gonna be doing things like home automation so you can tell it to turn on your Philips hue likes for example you can use it for a setting a timer in your kitchen there are a lot of use cases where it does overlap with the sort of home assistance but it's got a bit of personality you can't like fist bump Alexa a vector this bump kkuk asking sports questions math questions and even oddly satisfying challenge him to became a blackjack if he wins he's kind of a jerk and gloats and he's a sore loser kind of pouting when he's beaten if you pick him up he gets pissed if you knock him over he'll yell at you and he'd pick himself back up at these little kind of subtleties that make him seem more personable so as high res color IPS display brings this personality to life he's got a touch pad on his back and it feels like acting excited or annoyed or really anything you can pet him to to calm him down and you can almost see the relief in his eyes it's kind of cool although I'm not sure I want many people to see me petting a robot in public so vector does more you can introduce yourself to him and he can learn your face and voice and I'll act all excited when he hears you come home you can scan his surroundings so he knows where he's at and surprisingly he's pretty good at it during our demo he came dangerously close to falling off edges but never once did unki told us they want people to not have to worry about him and just kind of leave him alone he'll charge himself get OTA updates and explore all without you having to do anything vector was designed that if you just set him up and then left your house for a year then still be working and exploring when you got back and still happy to see him vectors equipped with four mics and an HD camera the 120 degree ultra wide field of view something which screamed huge privacy risk to me I was able to directly ask on key and they told me no images or audio recordings ever leave the robot and they all stay encrypted on vector himself there wasn't a lot more detail on how different components are broken up inside that prevent external hacking most of it cut over my head I was satisfied the answers though but whenever I bring something into my house with mics and cameras I'm obviously a bit skeptical the STK on key is launching it's gonna be pretty significant here users would be able to make him do pretty much anything if you want him to dance if he plays music you can do it if you want him to watch TV with you you can build that too it's it's pretty neat and feature-rich so saying I felt an emotional connection to a robot is strange to say out loud but alone on camera but vector feels oddly relatable he makes eye contact when he looks at you he gets super pumped when he gets to set a timer just be helpful and he's generally just fun and I want to be crystal clear here no one actually needs this but I definitely want one the best endorsement that I can give a product is to put my own money behind it and I'm absolutely backing back here on Kickstarter I think my kids I'll have a blast just running around her house with him I think you guys will too