This Tiny Robot Let's You Play God With Huge AI

By Alex Cranz on at

We were all quite excited a few weeks ago when Anki announced its plan to move beyond smartphone controlled cars and 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 were sparse. Now we know, and the SDK is so jam-packed with goodies it could turn Cozmo into the Commodore 64 of robotics: a device that changes how people interact with abstruse technology.

The Commodore 64 changed the way we thought about computers. Before that ugly box got plugged into TVs, 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 the her Hue lights. As soon as Cozmo saw more than two people sit down on the sofa it dimmed the lights for prime film watching ambience.

This Tiny Robot Let's You Play God With Huge AI

Cozmo, and a visualisation of what Cozmo sees via the SDK.



This Tiny Robot Let's You Play God With Huge AI

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, than you can enjoy that one feature while delving into the other.
