This Tiny Robot Lets You Play God With Huge AI

This Tiny Robot Lets You Play God With Huge AI

We were all quite pumped a few weeks ago when Anki announced its plan to move beyond smartphone controlled cars into emotionally intelligent robots. At the time of the announcement Anki indicated that it would release an SDK with the inclusion of Cozmo, but until now details on what that SDK would be were sparse. Now we know, and the SDK is so jam-packed with goodies that it could turn Cozmo into the Commodore 64 of robotics — a device that changes how people interact with abstruse technology.

Image: Anki

The Commodore 64 changed the way we thought about computers. Before that ugly box got plugged into TVs across the country computers were still for the very rich, the very smart and the ladies programming the IBM beasts that took up entire floors of buildings. The Commodore 64 gave the average consumer the chance to compute and the slew of easy to understand programming languages, including BASIC and Logo, allowed anyone with an idea and a little time to become a software developer.



Tappeiner’s wife, a programmer with no background in robotics, had access to the SDK for an hour and immediately linked it up to her Hue lights. As soon as Cozmo saw more than two people sit down on the couch it dimmed the lights for prime movie watching.




Accessing the SDK via the Cozmo app on an iPad Mini.

The SDK not only takes advantage of all that code smooshed into Cozmo’s brain, but it lets you turn individual pieces off and on. If you don’t like how Cozmo perceives only five human emotions, you can take advantage of its ability to recognise 40 points on a face and distinguish between humans and other animals, and create your own emotion recognition protocol. If you are OK with how it recognises faces, but yearn for better path programming, then you can enjoy that one feature while delving into the other.
