Amazon’s new home robot, Astro, follows you around the house and costs US$1,000
- Astro, about the size of a small dog, is equipped with a screen, moves around on wheels and uses data it picks up from its camera to avoid bumping into things
- Amazon’s Echo is being turned into a tablet-like device that can recognise users in a household and serve up personalised information, such as a calendar
E-commerce firm Amazon’s first home robot looks far too cute to become anything like the homicidal robots we tend to see in sci-fi films that want to hurt us.
Astro is about the size of a small dog or a vacuum cleaner, comes equipped with a screen that rotates, can wheel around a house on its own and uses data it picks up from its camera to avoid bumping into things.
“In five to 10 years, we believe that every household will have at least one robot that will become a fundamental part of their daily life,” Amazon’s head of devices David Limp said on September 28 as he unveiled the robot.
Astro can be used for communication and as a mobile security system to patrol a home on its own. It can also, for example, follow and monitor elderly family members as they move through a house.
Limp tested Astro at home for about a year, using it to check if his dogs were jumping on the sofa when no one was at home. The camera can be raised up to a height of a metre (3ft 3 inches) so it can peer over objects. The company plans to initially make Astro available to selected users for around US$1,000.