Gadgetory

hey vector my name is dieter dieter apparently this little guy right here named vector he's a home robot from Anki and here's a question what can you do with know if you're familiar with Anki you know that they make another robot called cosmo that looks a lot like this little dude but the differences are that this thing is way more powerful it's designed to be always on it's connected to Wi-Fi and it knows what's going on around it all the time it's just sort of looking around hanging out and it has a lot more powerful technology and it - so there's a laser sensor on the front little capacitive sensor here so I can feel if you're petting it it has four microphones so it can hear you say its name and respond to you and answer questions like what's the weather like to understand what all of that means we came to Aki's offices here in San Francisco to talk to the people that made vector and find out what they think you can do with it on key calls vector a home robot which makes you think about Rosie from the Jetsons but vector can't really do that much it can do some very basic assistant stuff like Alexa but Aki is spending way more time working on the robots personality than its utility you can think of them as an older brother for Cosmo but definitely not Cosmo hey Victor I have a question what's the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles hey vector set a timer for 10 seconds every one of our products will be a character it'll have a name it'll be different personalities because if you have a robot that helps you with you know with something more functional or Hazen meant to do something in healthcare or security or something like that it's a very different type of personality but still has to be an interface that's actually very intuitive and very warm a robotic personality could very quickly become really gimmicky so vector doesn't actually talk too much it just sort of chirps and beeps like a little Joyce unless you specifically ask it a question but more importantly its actions are designed to react to the environment which makes it feel a little bit more alive we really place close to tension to have behaviors be based on either sensors or what the user is is doing so that was a big piece for us not just having a robot who was entertaining briefly but something that felt very alive over the course of the day the thing that's really different is that he has interactions that are physical and based on you hanging out with him so if you turn on music he'll pick up the exact P and he'll start dancing to the beat right like that's new or you know if I pet him he'll get really blissed-out by it and then there's things that we didn't design that just happened so if you turn on the TV he will watch that TV because he's listening to the sound yeah and then the screen triggers his motion detector so he gets really interested by different things personality may go a long way but is that really enough reason to buy a quote-unquote home robot when you think about kind of that stereotype of the humanoid robot you end up going into a bad place for two reasons one is you hit a price point that is totally impractical for the level of capability as possible today right and you end up pigeonholing yourself because you end up trying to match the strengths and weaknesses of a human which don't map perfectly to the strengths and weaknesses of robotics today and if you miss anything you hit on Kenny the uncanny valley which is uh basically creepy and unnatural by making a character that is very humanistic in its qualities but far but not trying to sound or look or feel like a human you actually can better match your strengths and your weakness and avoid the weaknesses right you can set expectations right way B and so the fact that he's still a cute little character I don't expect him to give me a beer which is the test exactly right so vector can't bring you a cold one but that doesn't mean it's not technologically advanced it basically has the guts of a smartphone inside it including a faster processor and Wi-Fi which means that it can always stay connected to the Internet and doesn't really need you to take care of it it can hang out on its own find its own charger and not fall off the table it does a lot of that with surprisingly advanced computer vision for such a tiny package so what you're seeing here is a visualization of the robot and as I turn him he can feel it by virtue of that gyro I talked about yeah he knows he's turning in space and you can also see he's building slowly building maps so I'm gonna manually drive him around so you can see you can see his cube in 3d and they go like I was saying before that's using the the marker and if I move that around you can see it moves in 3d and now I'm gonna show you show them the cube and so he sees it just and he's able to position it he knows exactly where that is really down to the millimeter Wow cuz that's what it takes for him to pick it up so is it able to place our faces and space as well in this map yeah see in your eyes nose and mouth there and if we if we introduce ourselves to him he'll eventually associate a name with each of these places you're the green where I've shaded on the blue am Jade moving in space and you can see if I move closer it will also move move closer this thing can recognize faces how are you doing facial recognition on a little tiny robot what's interesting is most people's eyes are about the same distance apart so that's a that's a known distances which is all we really need so by realizing how far apart my iOS eyes are in the image I can tell how far away the face is roughly but it lets him remember where I am in space which means that if he decides is going to pick up that cube he turns around and drives over here uh-huh he remembers I'm here and that allows him to do something we call referencing which is something kids also do right before they they want to do something go often sort of look up at you make sure you're watching them he can do that as well it can turn back and check me out and then go and pick up this cube and what's powerful about that is it it takes it from being an experience where you're watching a robot pick up a cube right to one where you're sort of drawn into the experience and in doing it doing in with him or break life so he can tell if you're making eye contact he can tell if we're looking at each other instead of him right so we can also use that information to try this behaviour hey vector fist-bump you can turn around drive around he's sitting in his home right now imagine gonna put him on our counter like sound the floor a coffee table a party yeah so living room coffee table kitchen table there's a we'd have a accessory that's kind of like his habitat and the keys that he's always on you forget you should forget that you there is an on/off switch he'll charge himself go back this charger he'll be sleeping for part of the day he'll wake up when something interesting happens and a lot of this is gonna be the magic that builds out all of the subtleties around him being alive okies launching the vector robot on Kickstarter today and when it ships in October it's gonna retail for about 250 bucks but if you get this thing don't expect it to have the same utility is even a $50 Amazon echo after all this thing is only part digital assistant it's also part toy and part I don't know little cute robot bed thing but what it actually is is a chance to experience what it's like to have an autonomous robot in your house it turns out the main utility of the vector robot is something we don't talk about very much in tech it's fun thanks so much for watching I want to know what would you do if you had a little tiny robot in your house let me know in the comments and oh hey one more thing we're gonna be taking a little break I've got jury duty people who have vacations and will be back sometime in September and so I'm just gonna roll this on for a little bit longer because that's what I do goodbye