If you had your very own home
robot, what would you want it to
do, exactly? Pick up after you? Do the dishes? Help you make coffee? Yeah, me too, but that kind of robot is a long, long ways off. That isn’t stopping robotics companies from jumping into the robotic assistant fray. Consider Jibo, essentially a dancing Amazon
Alexa. And Kuri, a miniaturized R2-D2 that roams around your house
taking pictures. If that doesn’t sound particularly impressive to you, well, the market felt the same way. Jibo Inc. has reportedly
laid off the bulk of its staff, and Kuri’s maker, Mayfield Robotics, announced last month that it’s pausing operations and refunding pre-orders. Now joining the scrum is a rather more established company, Anki, which makes the popular Cozmo, a robot toy you control with your phone. Today it’s announcing that it has taken Cozmo and supercharged it from a plaything into an autonomous home assistant—named Vector. It’s charming, it’s (relatively) smart, and it’s mobile, the product of a recent convergence of technologies in robotics. The question is: Can Vector succeed where other home robots have failed?
