- Hey Vector.
(robot chimes)
My name is Dieter.
(robot chimes)
- [Vector] Diter.
Diter.
- [Andrew] You're Diter apparently.
(upbeat music)
- This little guy right here,
he's named Vector.
He's a home robot from Anki, and here's a question,
what can you do with him?
Now if you're familiar with Anki,
you know that they make another robot called Cozmo
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 wifi,
and it knows what's going on around it all the time.
It's just sort of lookin' around, hanging out.
And it has a lot more powerful technology in it too.
So there's a laser sensor on the front,
little capacitive sensor here so it 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 Anki'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.
Anki calls Vector a home robot,
which makes you think about Rosie from The Jetson's,
but Vector can't really do that much.
It can do some very basic assistance stuff,
like Alexa, but Anki is spending way more time
working on the robot's personality than its utility.
- You can think of him as an older brother for Cozmo,
but definitely not Cozmo.
Hey Vector.
(robot chimes)
I have a question.
(robot chirps)
What's the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles?
(robot chimes)
- [Vector] The distance is approximately 347 miles
from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
(both laugh)
- Hey Vector.
(robot chimes)
Set a timer for 10 seconds.
(robot alarms)
(both laugh)
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 something more functional,
where he's meant to do something in healthcare,
or security, or something like that,
it's a very different type of personality,
but it still has to be an interface
that's actually very intuitive and very warm.
- [Dieter] A robotic personality could very quickly
become very gimmicky, so Vector doesn't actually
talk too much, it just sort of chirps and beeps,
like a little droid, 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 placed close attention to have
behaviors be based on either sensors,
or what the user is doing.
So that was a big piece for us,
not just having a robot who is 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 beat,
he'll start dancing to the beat, right?
Like that's new.
Or if I pet him, he'll get really blissed out by it.
(robot chirps) (laughs)
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,
and then the screen triggers his motion detectors
so he gets really interested by different things.
- [Dieter] 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 that's possible today,
and you end up pigeon holing 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 the uncanny value,
which is basically creepy and unnatural.
By making a character, it is very humanistic
in his qualities, but not trying to sound,
or look, or feel like a human, you actually
can better match your strengths
and avoid your weaknesses.
- You can set expectations.
- And you set expectations right away.
And so the fact that he's still a cute little character.
- Means I don't expect him to get me a beer,
which is the test for all robots, right?
- That's exactly right.
- [Dieter] 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 smart phone inside it,
including a faster processor, and wifi,
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, so he knows
he's turning in space, and you can also see
he's slowly building a map.
So I'm gonna manually drive him around.
So you can see he can see his cube in 3D,
and like I was saying before,
that's using the marker, and if I move that around,
you can see it moves in 3D with him.
Now I'm gonna show him the cube in space.
- [Dieter] Oh he sees it, and he's able
to position it floating around
in space. - [Andrew] He knows exactly
where it is, really down to the millimeter,
'cause that's what it takes for him to pick it up.
- So is it able to place our faces in space as well
on this map?
- Yeah, seein' your eyes, nose, and mouth there,
and if we introduce ourselves to him,
he'll eventually associate a name
with each of these faces.
You're the green lamp shade, and I'm the blue lamp shade.
- And we're movin' in space.
- We're movin' in space, and you can see,
if I move closer, it will also 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 known distance, which is all we really need.
So by realizing how far apart my 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 he's gonna
go pick up that cube, and he turns around
and drives over here, he remembers I'm here,
and that allows him to do something we call referencing,
which is something kids also do right before
they wanna do something, they'll often sort of
look up at you, make sure you're watching them.
He can do that as well, he can turn back
and check me out, and then go and pick up his cube,
and what's powerful about that is it
takes it from being an experience where you're
watching a robot pick up a cube,
to one where you're sort of drawn into the experience
and doing it with him, or being involved.
And he can tell if you're making eye contact
he can tell if we're looking at each other
instead of him, so we can also use
that information to drive his behaviors.
- Hey Vector.
(robot chirps)
- Fist bump.
(robot chirps)
- He can tootle around, drive around,
he's sittin' in his home right now.
I imagine I'm gonna put him on a counter,
sit on the floor, a coffee table,
like where does he live?
- Yeah, so living room, coffee table,
kitchen table, we even have an accessory
that's kind of like his habitat,
and the key is that he's always on,
you should forget that there is an on/off switch,
he'll charge himself, go back to his 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.
- Anki is 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 as 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 pet 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, and I wanna 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 have got vacations,
and we'll be back sometime in September.
And so, I'm just gonna roll this on for a little bit longer,
'cause that's what I do.
Goodbye.