Since its founding in 2010 by three Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute grads, Anki has been at the forefront of realizing our robot-in-the-home reality—through disarmingly adorable toys. The company’s two-year-old Cozmo ($180), a manic little bulldozer bot that drives around and plays simple games, was the best-selling toy, by revenue, on Amazon in the U.S., U.K., and France in 2017, according to analysis by One Click Retail, and helped Anki bring in nearly $100 million in revenue last year. This October, Anki is releasing the $250 Vector. The palm-size bot looks like Cozmo, but inside it’s entirely different. The company spent years imbuing Vector with a humanlike ability to react and engage with both its environment and people. It’s designed for play—and a whole lot more. “We’ve always known that this is not a toy company,” says cofounder and CEO Boris Sofman.
Cartography capability
Using an infrared laser scanner, Vector builds a digital representation of its environment through a process called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Drop sensors allow it to drive across a tabletop, say, and stop just before the edge. “We want him to be inquisitive, to map his environment,” says Meghan McDowell, Anki’s director of program management.
Processing power
Vector’s brain, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 212 chip, allows the bot to run a neural network that’s being trained to understand the world around it; online updates will further deepen its visual intelligence. The big achievement for launch: Vector detects people, even when faces aren’t visible.
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