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"We wrote a huge amount of software inside of Maya to allow our animators not to animate a movie, but an actual robot," Tappeiner says. The company utilizes Maya, an industry-standard animation tool, to render various actions for Cozmo. To create these emotion states for Cozmo, Anki began drawing from the expertise of former Pixar animator Carlos Baena, who was hired last year to run character direction. By mixing and mashing these traits as if they were colors, Cozmo can replicate a surprisingly complex range of human-like emotions. Drawing from academic psychology, those different states - happy, calm, brave, confident, and excited, to name a few - are derived from combinations of the big five personality traits used to describe the human psyche. The real appeal of Cozmo, though, comes in what Anki is calling an emotion engine, which powers a wide range of different states the robot is capable of emulating. Much of Cozmo’s heavier processing tasks are handled by a smartphone that’s been paired over Wi-Fi with Anki’s new mobile app, which frees up the robot itself from having to house more complex computer parts. The robot uses facial recognition technology powered by a camera where its mouth would be to remember different people, and its software will learn and adapt to you over time the more you play with it. For comparison, Thinkway’s traditional remote-controlled R2-D2 costs $150, while Sphero’s app-controlled BB-8 replica runs $130.Ĭozmo will come with a set of sensor-embedded blocks that are used both to play games with the robot and to help it understand its position in the environment. But the company says Cozmo’s advanced software and high-quality hardware make it worth the money. That's expensive when you consider Anki’s Overdrive racing package is only $150. The robot is designed for ages eight and up and will sell for $180 in October, with pre-orders starting today. Now, several years after the idea was first conceived, Cozmo is ready for the wider world. "The problem we had was that cars aren’t the best form factor to bring personalities out." So Anki kept the idea under wraps and toiled in secret on using AI and robotics to "bring a character to life which you would normally only see in movies," Tappeiner says. "In the very beginning, when we started working on the first version of Drive, we realized that characters and personalities are a big deal," says Hanns Tappeiner, Anki’s co-founder and president. Anki’s first robot fits in the palm of your hand, and it also happens to employ some of the most sophisticated AI software ever made available to consumers. Anki has always considered itself an artificial intelligence and robotics company, even if the average consumer could only see a toy car racing around a track. The company was founded in 2010 by a trio of Carnegie Mellon graduates with PhDs in robotics. The robot is the latest creation from Anki, a Silicon Valley toymaker best known for building small race cars you can control using a mobile app. Some are new, but others it remembers from before it fell asleep.Ĭozmo is the culmination of years of Anki's robotics and AI work When it wheels back and reorients itself, Cozmo takes a hard look at the other faces in the room.
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When it gets too close, it slams to a halt and looks down over the cliff, emitting a series of terrified chirps. It makes a subtle motion to indicate it’s shaking off its slumber and begins wheeling over to the edge of the table. With the tap of a smartphone screen, Cozmo comes to life. It’s lifelike enough to evoke sympathy, but still enough of a toy not to teeter too close to the uncanny valley. Like Pixar’s adorably anthropomorphic WALL-E, Cozmo falls somewhere between a Mars rover and an animated woodland creature. The small robot - shaped like a miniaturized bulldozer with a CRT monitor for a cockpit - sits in a charging dock, waiting to be awoken.