Why Amazon built a home robot – TechCrunch

CEO of iRobot once told me, with a wink, that he didn’t become a successful roboticist until he became a vacuum cleaner salesman. It’s a good line, and one that betrays some basic truths about the industry. Robots are tough, and in many ways household robots are doubly tough.

That no one has cracked the code beyond the wild success of robotic vacuums like the Roomba is not for lack of trying. To date, it’s largely the realm of startups like Anki and Jibo (or the rare exception of Bosch-created Kuri), but today Amazon announced that it is putting its own massive resources behind the problem.

In fact, he does more than that. The company has just announced its first robot, Astro. The product is taking its first steps on the market as part of the Amazon Day One Edition program. Previously, Amazon used the platform in a manner similar to Kickstarter or Indiegogo, where customers effectively vote with their pre-orders. The new robot, which shares a name with the dog Jetsons, a track on the debut of the White Stripes and the major league baseball team in Houston, will be available on a limited basis later this year. Astro is, by far, the most ambitious device to launch with the program, which has so far included things like a receipt printer and a smart cuckoo clock. It’s also the most expensive, with a price tag of $ 999.

The price, however, is expected to rise rapidly. According to Amazon press documents,

Astro will cost $ 1,449.99, but as part of the Day 1 program, it will be available for the introductory price of $ 999.99 and include a six-month free trial of Ring Protect Pro.

The robot performs three main functions at launch:

1. Home security
2. Monitoring of relatives
3. Providing a sort of mobile version of the Alexa home experience

The company started working on the robot around four years ago, relying on different departments at Amazon to build a fully realized home robot.

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“We talked about AI, computer vision, and processing power, and one of the topics we covered was robotics,” Amazon vice president Charlie Tritschler told TechCrunch. “How has robotics changed to make it possible for consumers. We have of course a lot of experience using robotics in our distribution center, but we thought about what you could do for the consumer at home to make things more convenient or provide more peace of mind. spirit. It got us thinking, and in the end we were like, “Damn, does anyone think we won’t have robotics at home in five to ten years?” “

Amazon Robotics – which began in 2012 with the company’s acquisition of Kiva Systems – has been a sounding board for the ideas of the consumer team. But the company’s existing robotics are industrial and primarily focused on delivering packages in the shortest time possible. Ultimately, Amazon said it needs to build many components of Astro from scratch, including, most notably, the SLAM (Simultaneous Locate and Mapping) system that it uses to map and navigate around the house.

This last element struck me as particularly surprising, given not only the complexity of the business (this is something that iRobot has effectively iterated on for a decade), but also given some of the robotic technologies that Amazon currently hosts. Most notably, the company acquired Canvas, a fully self-sustaining warehouse cart startup, in 2019. But Amazon insists the new SLAM system was built from the ground up, and even though it was considering making acquisitions of robotic startups, he ultimately did not do so in to build Astro. However, other internal technologies have been taken into account, including Ring’s security monitoring and various Alexa and home technologies, built into the robot, which includes Amazon’s smart assistant.

I had the opportunity to interact with Astro last week, and the robot has a bit of a split personality, from that point of view. The main robot personality is best described as something akin to R2-D2 / BB8 or Wall-E. Her face, which is actually a screen or tablet, sports a pair of minimalist eyes – like a set of lowercase, bold “o” letters. They blink and rush every now and then, but they’re nowhere near as expressive as what Anki hired a team of former Pixar and Dreamworks animators to create with Cozmo.

This is augmented by the occasional beeps and bloops, which are reminiscent of the aforementioned Star Wars droids. The robot can be summoned with an “Astro,” but when you need to converse more directly, that requires an “Alexa,” in which case the familiar voice assistant takes over.

Besides offering some personality, Astro’s 10-inch touchscreen doubles as the standard Echo Show display, allowing you to do things like watch a movie, conference call, and control your smart home. The screen moves on its own and can be manually tilted 60 degrees for a better appearance. The display also supports Amazon’s new Visual ID facial recognition to personalize interactions with Astro.

There is also a pair of speakers on board. Although the robot itself is surprisingly quiet (it is not a robotic vacuum cleaner). In fact, Amazon told me they need to introduce sound like an electric car, so you know when it’s going around the house. However, sometimes you hear the sound of a servo as it rotates to turn by changing the direction of its wheels.

There is a rear cargo bin (which has an optional cup holder) that can carry up to 4.4 pounds. Inside is a USB-C port so you can charge your phone. Astro itself has a Roomba-style docking station and takes less than an hour to charge from zero to full.

Unsurprisingly, there are a whole bunch of sensors on board. This includes proximity sensors built into its base and a pair of cameras, including a five-megapixel RGB built into its face / screen bezel. The other is decidedly more surprising, coming out of the top of his head. This 12 megapixel RGB / IR camera is suitable for live streaming. Its retractable base can extend up to four feet, to serve as a sort of periscope for the robot to see better.

After spending about an hour with the robot and its creators, I have to say I’m quite impressed with what the team has built here. Of course, the question of how many people are interested in owning the thing is quite different. The company claims to have tested Astro in “thousands” of homes to resolve issues, such as getting stuck in an occasional corner. The Day One program is less of a public beta than a method of gauging customer interest in the product.

“I think this is the first in a series of robots that we are making. This is an invitation-only program – we want to make sure that people who receive Astro can have a great experience, given the challenge of homes and different spaces, ”said Tritschler. “When we think long term, when we think of consumer robotics, of course we want to have all kinds of price ranges and capabilities, and have a more focused consumer product as part of that. But we think Astro is a good place to start to reaffirm all the work we’ve done to create value from day one and make sure what we’ve done really makes sense to the consumer. We’ll be interested in getting that feedback when we start shipping the product later in the year.