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Robotics

Amazon Just Revealed its First Home Robot (cnbc.com) 83

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Amazon announced its long-rumored $999 Astro home robot on Tuesday. CNBC: I had a chance to check it out in a demo with Amazon last week and wanted to share a few thoughts on what Astro is, what it can and can't do and why Amazon decided to build a home robot. Astro seems like a strange gadget for Amazon to launch. The company is best known as an online store. And most of its operating profit comes from its AWS cloud business. Notably, Astro is a "Day 1 Edition" product, which means it won't be sold to everyone at first. [...] Astro is about the size of a small dog. It roams around your house on three wheels, including two big ones that prevent it from getting stuck and a smaller one for rotating. It has a camera that rises up on a 42-inch arm that can keep an eye on your home as Astro patrols while you're away. It can follow you around and play music or display TV shows on its 10-inch touchscreen. It can recognize faces (if you want it to) so you can load up two sodas in the back storage compartment and tell Astro to go to someone in the living room.

Astro is like a combo of lots of Amazon's other gadgets placed on wheels. The cameras can be used for home security or for video chat, sort of combining Amazon's Ring cameras with its Echo Show smart screens. The cameras are also used to create a map of your house when you set Astro up for the first time. You can talk to Astro much like you'd talk to an Echo or Alexa (you can change the name to Alexa if you want) to get sports scores or the weather. And you can play movies or TV shows like you would on an Amazon tablet or Fire TV.
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Amazon Just Revealed its First Home Robot More

Amazon Just Revealed its First Home Robot

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  • Awesome. Spycam / spymic on wheels? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @02:15PM (#61841897)

    Alexa just wasn't quite creepy enough. Now Astro can follow you right into the bathroom!

  • of a Dilbert cartoon where he had built (IIRC) and overly helpful robot that started to order stuff it thought he needed, and threw out stuff to make room for more stuff.

    I wonder how much of Astro was inspired by that cartoon...

    • Yeah I think it's just a reference to The Jetsons.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        You'd think that a reference to the Jetsons when it comes to home robots would be called Rosie.

        Astro was just the dog, and didn't do any housework afaik.

        • This thing isn't doing housework though. It's Alexa/Echo/Ring/Fire all duct taped together and on wheels.
        • You have to look at it from a Marketing point of View. Rosie is a robot who doesn't have human feelings towards her owners, but Astro is often heard to say "I ruv you Reorge!"

      • From TFA:

        It’s not quite the level of Rosie the robot from the TV show “The Jetsons.” (Speaking of that show, Astro is not named after the Jetsons’ dog, Tritschler said. Early testers just preferred that name over others.)

  • would like it to be much more self contained. I don't want it communicating outside the house with anyone but me unless given specific instructions to do so.

    • That won't happen with a company like Amazon. Their entire purpose for home appliances / screens / robots is to gather as much info as possible about you and yours. It's a data siphon first and foremost. Functionality for the end-user is secondary to that purpose.

      • Oh, I completely agree about it not coming from Amazon (or any other company where you are the product), it would need to come from a company that just wants to sell robots or robots/software. The technology needed for this is probably not here yet, but I think we are getting closer.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          The tech is getting close, but I think the use case isn't there. Maybe if you lived in Balmoral Castle or something you might need a voice assistant to follow you around, but the introductory price for Astro is $999 (set to go up to $1499 later). For $240 I can put an Echo Dot in every room of my house and not have to worry about tripping over the damn thing.

    • That's not really possible. Speech and image processing are heavy-duty tasks that are generally performed "in the cloud", not on your phone. This is already the case for smartphone text-to-speech and for autonomous driving. Presumably the same will be true of a robot that navigates your house and listens to your voice.

  • Astro seriously? that was the dog.

  • Home spy robot. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @02:40PM (#61841983)

    If you buy this thing then be prepared to learn that it reports everything it learns, including what you own, housing dimensions, your conversations, and just about anything else you can imagine.

    I trust Amazon as far as I can throw their CEO... and I can't even seem to get access to his house in order the throw him and there is a restraining order against me for some reason which is just crazy.

    • Re:Home spy robot. (Score:4, Informative)

      by spiritgreywolf ( 683532 ) * on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @02:41PM (#61841989) Homepage Journal

      Only if you have an active internet connection. The moment you lose wireless it becomes a giant, useless immobile paperweight...

      • Only if you have an active internet connection. The moment you lose wireless it becomes a giant, useless immobile paperweight...

        Fortunately this isn't a Google product, which would be guaranteed to become a giant, useless immobile paperweight in 18-24 months when it somehow didn't sell a billion units and Google pulled the plug on the "cloud" software that makes it actually do anything.

        Robots with sufficient on-board processing to do what this thing does (as minimal as that is) don't cost $1000, so I expect you're right, it's all off-board processing.

    • I turned of my Hey Google for this very reason.

      • This is on par with feeling safe because you disable the chainsaw feature on your Stabby Bot 9000 because you are still getting stabbed.

    • If you're worried about these things, you'd be shocked to find out what's already a public record. Like your "housing dimensions". The plans summitted for the building permit don't just disappear.

      • Except the town gubmit housing permit copy of those layout plans are sitting in a file cabinet somewhere in a local gubmit office and mostly forgotten. This robot keeps those plans in 'active memory' (so to speak) for both corporations, and federal gubmint.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Maybe in some small towns, but in most places they've been digitized and attached to the tax records.

        • Except the town government decided to digitize their records years ago, in order to stop having to buy more file cabinets.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      *Full Disclosure* - I work at Amazon, but nothing to do with this.

      Why do people think that their conversations with the cat are interesting enough to waste bandwidth, processing and storage on? Not even the cat actually cares. Bezos and Jassey trust the things enough to have them in their homes, and **their** conversations would actually be worth monitoring, unlike yours or mine. That's because they know how they work.

      All of the Echo devices have the MAC address printed on them. If you want to know what

      • The concern is that while most conversations have no value some do. Some would provide information on a person's price sensitivity for products, so only "deals" would be provided. Other information might indicate the categories of things a person might want to buy - which is great until it isn't - people's partners start seeing adds for things that are private (like divorce attorneys).

        Then of course there is the governments interest in protecting the public against child molesters, terrorists, spreaders

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Is bandwidth, storage and compute time is free? Not at AWS it isn't. Each user of resources gets charged, I work in physical security and we have to pay for VMs and storage for our NVRs to record security video at the Corporate offices. Twitch pays for resources it uses, so does Ring. so does the Alexa group. With thousands to tens of thousands of audio clips per minute to decode and respond to that's going to be a massive expense, do you really think product price sensitivity will be valuable enough to

      • Why do people think that their conversations with the cat are interesting enough to waste bandwidth, processing and storage on? Not even the cat actually cares.

        You speak as if Big Data isn't a thing or that browser fingerprinting doesn't exist. Just because they aren't streaming out everything you say, doesn't mean they aren't listening for words of interest.

        At any point, anyone with enough influence (monetary or otherwise) could decide they want to hear conversations including certain words. If it doesn't already, the echo firmware would easily be modified to always be recording to local circular buffer to catch entire conversations. When a "wake word" is dete

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          You speak as if network bandwidth, storage and compute capacity were free and unlimited. This is a business that has to make money, not a leech on society like the NSA.

          • So long as Amazon gets paid for the content recorded then it's not a problem.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by cusco ( 717999 )

              We're not Google, Amazon does not sell customer data, ever. We have to take periodic training (yearly, I think) on data classification. Customer data has the highest classification, Jeff Bezos personnel record has a lower classification than customer data.

              • Google wasn't google... until they were. Give it time, maybe some leadership changes and they'll be slurping up that data soon enough.

    • Not the first one. It was already reported that Roomba sent your housing dimensions over the internet.

  • Just what I/we've always wanted -- nay, needed. (Score:4, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @02:44PM (#61841999)

    It can follow you around and play music or display TV shows on its 10-inch touchscreen.

    How have I/we managed to even live w/o this? /sarcasm

  • Are there accessories available? (Score:3)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @02:53PM (#61842021)

    I'd like to add something stabby for when people I either don't know, or don't like, or both are in my house.

  • A robot must be at least 5 feet tall. Minimum. Also it should be able to fetch me a snack or a soda from the fridge.

    • The bigger they are, the harder it is to wrestle them to the ground when they run amuck.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Alexa, send the robot dog to bring me a beer from the fridge.

    • You could try kids instead. Cheap initial purchase although seriously demanding on subsequent resources and maintenance (and takes a while to match the height requirement), but they are very versatile, can easily fetch a beer (even tell a cold from a lukewarm one), provides lots of entertainment, can learn to drive your car for you, and will potentially take care of you when your facilities start to fail.

      Of course, like the tech companies, they will also spy on you, breach your integrity, learn all your pat

  • I can see it now, the robot will have one of the most hated features of the shows. It will roll up to you and say by the way.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Yep, for the price, you can get 7 or so 10" tablets with cameras and place them around the house if you *really* can't stand the thought of being more than a few feet from a screen at any time, with the bonus of being able to spread them across upstairs and downstairs.

      I don't understand at all the utility of it having cupholders/other small cargo when you have to load and unload manually.

      It's a pretty bulky and expensive item for such limited function.

      • I don't understand at all the utility of it having cupholders/other small cargo when you have to load and unload manually.

        It's a party toy for rich people (or not-rich people who spend their money unwisely).

  • from the article ["Does anyone here in this meeting think that in 5-10 years there won’t be more robots in your home?’ And everyone was like, ‘Well, yeah, of course.’ It’s like, ‘Well, then, let’s get going.’”]
    ya - me!
    The reality is, in 5 years, I do not foresee a single useful home robot. Given there's nothing in R&D chain being hyped or alpha tested today, there will be nothing in mass build retail consumer mode in 5 years.
    As far as this th
    • Toys, cleaning, and surveillance. Those seem to be the use cases that manufacturers can realistically focus on with current tech. The more advanced robots in the labs are starting to get some useful features, like negotiating difficult terrain (stairs) or the ability to safely pick up arbitrary objects. A robot that can go about the house and fetch stuff would be cute, but what we really need is some machine learning that allows it to do so autonomously. Then you'd have a robot that could really clean,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Well, a few decades ago I had a robot record changer for 78 rpm records. I think I had one for 45s even earlier.

      Just because you don't see a robot doesn't mean there isn't one in the future, it just probably won't look like what you expect. Now really general purpose robots are probably at least a decade away, but specialized ones exist and are in (industrial) use already. The last hospital I was in had a robot that delivered medicines from the pharmacy to the nurses' station. It would even politely as

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Newer Otis elevators have Bluetooth that a couple of robots are using to communicate, they're "protected" by MAC address filtering. My understanding is that it's a fairly expensive option (like everything having to do with elevators), and I'd hate to see the wait to add a new device to the filter. The worst part about dealing with elevators for facilities and security people is dealing with the elevator guy, I've spent 4 hours twiddling my thumbs waiting for them to show up to land a pair of wires that I

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      I used to work with senior citizens (and am becoming one myself). Many, many people could stay in their homes for years longer if they just had a minimal amount of assistance, like help getting out of bed, bringing the phone or remote control, monitoring vital signs, reminding of and bringing their meds, monitoring if they've fallen or need assistance, and calling for assistance if necessary. Home health aides are expensive and can only stay for a couple hours a couple times a week, and burnout in that pr

  • Perfect! (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @03:33PM (#61842161)

    "The cameras can be used for home security or for video chat"

    I can finally annoy my cat during workday like she does it with me during the night.

  • ...Welcome Our Robot Overlords.
  • ... when I was a kid. Still seems more functional than this thing.

  • Brilliant, what will they think of next?

    An iPhone on top of a remote controlled toy car?

    • So... it's a vacuum cleaner with a Lenovo Yoga tablet

      If it was a vacuum cleaner I would buy it in a heartbeat. This thing is nowhere near that useful.

  • Astro was the dog.

    That said, if I were seriously disabled I'd think about it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      What kind of disability do you think it would help with? Judging by the earlier comments, I can't think of one.

  • Google is a monopolist in online advertising, Apple is a monopolist in their walled garden in that people will pay 2x as much for an Apple product as for a non apple, Facebook enjoys monopolistic profits due to the scale of their social network (you have to join because your friends are on), Microsoft still has near monopolistic on the core office applications (Word, Excel, Outlook). Amazon isn't the only web services company, it isn't even the biggest online store. They are just slightly better than ever

  • Wow, look ma, they just invented an Omnibot!

    https://www.everything80spodca... [everything80spodcast.com]

    Yo Grark

  • These are easy extensions built on technologies that already exist. It's basically just amazon echo mounted on a roomba/neato/roborock, without the cleaning utility.
    Atl east add some incremental changes. It needs to negotiate stairs to be useful in most homes.

  • If it would take the dog out to pee when we're away from home, or clean the cat litter box, it might be worth it. Otherwise...

    (and yes, I know there are so-called self-cleaning cat litter boxes)

    (I posted this to the wrong thread a few minutes ago...)

  • I've always wanted some mega corp to map the layout of my house, scan my possessions, occasionally take dick pics and otherwise be a constant, all seeing, all hearing presence. All so Amazon has the potential to make inferences about my wealth, health, activity, social life, work habits, eating habits etc.

    But hey, it's a tablet on wheels. That's useful right?

  • Is that you?

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