If the very sight of the Kuri social robot didn’t make your knees go weak with its cuteness, this new video showing the little white robot bobbing along to tunes certainly will.
Mayfield Robotics has released new footage of the white bot dancing along to Pancake Robot by Parry Gripp.
Although designed to be a personal assistant, this new feature really does show it off as a companion robot, built to bring a smile to every face that views its little head bobbing along in time.
However, Mayfield wants to show something other than just a dancing robot in its new video. It shows how the robot can react just like a human and understands sound, rather than just throwing some preinstalled moves.
Mayfield also wants to show that Kuri is constantly evolving it is always developing new features for it, so that when it launches at some point next year, it’ll be one of the most sophisticated social robots around.
09/01/2017: Kuri social robot has its own personality
Bosch subsidiary Mayfield Robotics has launched Kuri, a social robot that has its very own personality, just like a human.
The white robot is 20-inches tall and 12-inches wide, with a round head siting atop a cone body. Its head moves smoothly around its shoulders when it reacts to its human commander.
Kuri is packed full of high tech, including asynchronous motors, a capacitive touch sensor, microphones, speakers, and an HD camera, which are all used to make Kuri better at reacting to humans.
For example, it’ll react when you call its name, and will respond if you as it to do something, whether by taking back to you with squawks or moving its head to acknowledge what you’re asking it to do.
Like Apple, Google and Amazon’s voice recognition software, Kuri is triggered using the command “Hey Kuri” and 12 other pre-programmed phrases.
“It doesn’t feel like a robot in the traditional sense. It connects to people a different way than normal tech,” Matthews said. “It’s very much about what people feel.”
Kuri can map out its surroundings using lasers that work out how far the walls are around it, while always-on tracking stop it running into other objects that may get in its way as it zooms around your home atop its castor wheels, controlled by electric motors.
Kuri isn’t just controlled by speech though. There’s also a companion app that helps you navigate the robot around any environment using a virtual trackpad and microphone integrated into your device. You can also set the robot to record exactly what it’s doing and the video will be saved to the cloud so you can access it when you’re ready.
“We want to ship a complete product — one that’s useful for everybody. We’ll keep making it better,” Matthews said. “We want to build robots that are joyful, useful, and inspiring. Kuri moves, listens, sees, speaks, and entertains. We worked hard to make sure we were hitting on those three chords.”
