Anki showcases its Cozmo robot

Robotics company Anki has released its first commercial robot - Cozmo, stating it is a pioneer in its sector thanks to its advanced programming in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The playful, palm-sized robot, can recognise faces, play games and develop a personality based on how its operator interacts with it. Cozmo also has music and tonal varieties to distinguish the tone or mood of the bot at the time, giving it an 'emotion engine', which is what, the company says, makes the device so charming. Anki is a San Francisco-based start-up which gained major credibility when it designed a toy robotic racing car back in 2013. It recently received $52.5m in an investment round on Monday led by JP Morgan. The robot will be available in October, priced at $180.

Wall-E has a pint-sized sibling and its name is Cozmo. Anki, best known so far as the creator of Drive, those excellent smartphone-controlled toy race cars, today announced the launch of this little AI wonder.

Judging by the way Anki talks about its new bot, Cozmo isn't so much a tool as the answer to a question: Can we build robots that have personality, like what we see in the machines promised by sci-fi? As such, Cozmo dials the cute up to 11. It zips around a table, exploring the world with the goofy expression on its old-fashioned computer monitor "face." It looks at you and learns to recognize you. It loves to play, and comes with its own set of "smart blocks" for building.

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As Anki's promo video makes clear, the little bot is an amalgamation of the bleeding edge of machine vision, AI, mechanical engineering, programming, and more. But the core of the thing is something else, says The Verge:

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The real appeal of Cozmo, though, comes in what Anki is calling an emotion engine, which powers a wide range of different states the robot is capable of emulating. Drawing from academic psychology, those different states — happy, calm, brave, confident, and excited, to name a few — are derived from combinations of the big five personality traits used to describe the human psyche. By mixing and mashing these traits as if they were colors, Cozmo can replicate a surprisingly complex range of human-like emotions.

On the one hand, that may sound unlikely. On the other hand, R2-D2 clearly emotes via little more than lights and bleeps and bloops.

Cozmo sells for $180 and the first orders will be delivered in October. Nearly two hundred bucks is a steep price to pay for something that functionally is no more than a toy, but we have no doubt lots of parents will be caving in to demands for this adorable pal come Christmastime.