It’s no longer a question of if we’ll have personal robot assistants in the home, but when. A growing number of companies across the globe are now vying to be the first physical artificial intelligence-driven avatar in your home, including Robotbase and its simply-named Personal Robot.
On the strength of a slickly produced and compelling Kickstarter video, the U.S.-based company recently blasted past its relatively conservative fundraising goal of $50,000 to, at the time of this writing, collect over $65,000 in pledges.
The robot features a round screen atop its thin, 50-inch-tall body. It rolls around autonomously on a squat, round base.
In the video, the robot, which features an animated female face and woman’s voice, recognizes faces, emotions (based on expressions) and household objects. It can interpret conversational speech and talk to you. It uses SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) to map and navigate a room, can connect to and control smart home devices on a variety of network protocols including ZigBee, Z-wave, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and has sensors to read ambient temperature, humidity and air quality. The video shows the robot ordering food, offering meeting reminders, watching the home, taking pictures and handling telepresence duties.
In short, this robot appears to do it all. Of course, it also faces strong competition for a number of other personal robots in the 2015 pipeline, including the immobile, but adorable Jibo, which is supposed to become a family member, and the Softbank-backed Pepper from Aldebaran, which offers cloud-based intelligence and the ability to respond to your emotions.
I spoke to Robotbase CEO Duh Huynh about the distance between the video fantasy and the robot’s current reality.
“The video is not an actual demonstration,” said Huynh. He told me it’s a production video. “It’s what you’ll get by the end of the year.” That’s when Robotbase expects to start shipping the first of these personal robots to customers. On Kickstarter, these robots will sell for $1,995. And when the robot does finally ship, Huynh admits that it’s “not going to have that sexy beautiful voice like in the video.”
On the other hand, the Vietnamese-born Huynh contends that his robot is unique among personal assistant robots. It’s the only one, according to him, with deep learning, which is an offshoot of machine learning, but with more of an artificial intelligence bent.
For Huynh, this is Personal Robot’s secret sauce: One learning algorithm that enables facial, speech image voice and pattern recognition.
Huynh brought his working prototype to CES 2015, where he demonstrated Personal Robot for TechCrunch. While the robot offered a number of canned recreations of its Kickstarter video routines, it also appeared to recognize editor John Biggs on sight and responded to spoken commands from Huynh. On the other hand, it barely moved and the screen flickered on and off. Huynh later told me that most of the robot’s issues were the result of CES’s poor public Wi-Fi.
Huynh promises, though, that the final robot, which is powered by an Nvidia Tegra K1 mobile CPU, will be the rare crossover bot, the one that can traverse the home, enterprise and even the store. In retail, its connection to back-end systems and internal knowledge of the store’s floorplan could make it an able personal shopping assistant.
At work, it could serve as a telepresence device, easily switching from its default interface to the face of whomever is controlling Personal Robot from another office. Huynh, by the way, is aware of the growing competition in the telepresence robot space (Beam, Double Robots). “We feel telepresence is a feature, not a product,” he said.
As for the dull name, Huynh expects customers to name their own robots. Huynh named the prototype “Maya.” On the final, shipping robot, even the avatar and voice can be customized. “We’ve had people ask, ‘Can it be a face like Alfred from the Batman movies?’”
Still, for as attractive and interesting as the robot is, I was skeptical about the timeline. Could Personal Robot really be ready by Christmas? Huynh, who has a background in manufacturing and distribution, told me they’ve already selected a manufacturing partner.
Even so, Kickstarter is littered with unmet expectations and never-delivered products. When pressed, Huynh admitted, “It’s a very aggressive deadline,” but he remains confident Robotbase and the Personal Robot will hit its 2015 delivery date.