Years in the making, Amazon’s small multi-purpose robot called Astro is attached to a wheeled base allowing it to navigate a home. Though introduced late last year globally, to kick off the new Consumer Robotics Software Development Centre in Bangalore, Amazon offered a deeper understanding into the working of Astro.
Astro is not Alexa but Astro can be used as a platform for Alexa. More of that later. With its large eyes on the screen and different tones, the robot appears to have a unique persona. There are a number of use cases for Astro, like camera surveillance of different rooms in a house, it can check on people and pets, offer visuals of stoves by raising a camera on a telescopic arm and even carry simple small objects in the compartment that comes with the robot.
“We envision that in the next five to 10 years every home will have at least one robot, so we had set out building that robot. Late last year, we released our first home robot Astro and it will not be our last. We have customers who have Astro in their homes and we are building momentum on what they tell us… that Astro gives them a sense of security and its personality. Besides homes, we are also envisioning scenarios where Astro can be a part of small and medium businesses. It’s not too hard to imagine a day when we have a set of developers all working to create innovations on top of Astro’s platform. The opening of our Bangalore engineering centre is central to our future because it is going to allow us to add talent to our team,” said Ken Washington, VP, software engineering, Amazon.
The home mapping system which Astro depends on is perhaps the most important aspect. Unless Astro knows its location in context of the home, it will be of little use. So the robot can map your home’s layout as well as recognise objects. The other important aspects the robot takes care of are handling video calls, recognising you and coming to find you when someone calls.
There is a periscope-camera set-up to give a better view of the house
“It monitors your home while you are away; helps you care about the people who are close to you. Many existing home robots are made for single use cases. Our ambition was build a multi-purpose device. Astro brings together years of experience — hardware design, computer vision, artificial intelligence, voice and home monitor,” said Anna Santos, senior manager, product management, Amazon.
Like we mentioned earlier, there are cameras on the device. So you can access a live view of its video feed from the Astro app and remotely control its movements. As a smart display, it can play music, show you the weather, and answer questions.
When it comes to home security features, it can listen in for breaking glass or alarms, using Alexa Guard, and it can also pair with a Ring Protect Pro subscription to patrol your home while you’re away.
Once the set up is done, Astro responds by its name and can look in your direction with its 10-inch touchscreen, wheeling around to face you. There are many commands that can be used, for example you can ask it to go to a specific room, find a specific person, or just follow you around.
Since Astro can be a good solution for offering remote care, family members can ask Astro to set and deliver reminders, or you can use Drop In to stay connected. It works with Alexa Together, which allows for remote care for ageing members.
To function, the device needs a lot of data about the floor planning and you. For those worrying about privacy, much of the data stays on the device and some of it which gets sent back to Amazon’s Cloud is encrypted. All data related to facial recognition, home-mapping stay on the device. Users can view video remotely or control the robot remotely after pairing their phone to the device using a PIN. When it comes to live streaming videos, there are commands to stop streaming. People in the house can put Astro in do-not-disturb mode to stop attempts to stream video.
The robot is not for open sale (only by invitation) but imagine the potential when that happens.