Anki brings relationships to robotics
Imagine if toys could understood what you wanted them to do?
This story is now published on 🦄 Babyunicorns.com 🦄 at https://www.babyunicorns.com/articles/anki-brings-relationships-to-robotics
When I was a kid, everybody wanted a Furby. That same creepy hamster-owl, animatronic looking thing we love to make fun of now — was all the rage back in the late 90's. It didn’t matter if they sounded like cave babies, they could talk and interact with each other, and that made them not just a cute little doll, but a robot.
And everyone wants a robot, right?
Fast forward 20 years, and Anki’s totally upped the ante with their line of products. From Cozmo, the tiny companion who understands how you feel, to race cars that won’t wipe out every time they take a sharp turn, Anki is using AI to create “robots that move you.”
What is Anki?
Founded in 2010 by three Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute graduates, Anki’s line of Overdrive products (including products with The Fast and the Furious branding) are an intelligent version of your favorite Hot Wheels. Controlled through a companion mobile app, Overdrive sets come with a “battle track” you can construct to your liking, and a car that learns the more you drive it. Each piece of track includes infrared information that the cars consume and share with other cars on the track through the mobile app.
Cars get smarter and faster the better they perform and can use this learning to beat other racers —
The Overdrive line is poised to keep growing as it on-boards increasingly sophisticated iterations of both its infrared technology and smartphone app.
Anki’s other, and most popular product is Cozmo,
“a gifted little guy with a mind of his own.” Described as “a supercomputer on treads,”
Cozmo is a responsive robot that can play games, learn names, and respond to your feelings. Cozmo’s CEO has said that inspiration for the robot came from wondering —
“What would it take to bring a Pixar character to life?”
In fact, Anki is working with animators from Pixar and DreamWorks, who have designed over 1,000 of Cozmo’s “little movements.”
Cozmo’s “emotion engine” is an ingenious, albeit somewhat clunky, facsimile of a human brain. Unlike many other AI devices, most of Cozmo’s learning and work don’t happen within the actual device (computing actually takes place on the cloud), which keeps Cozmo small and nimble so it can evolve based upon its surroundings and most frequent human interactions.
Based on an MIT Media Lab project, Anki’s Code Lab grants access the back-end functionality of Cozmo,
— which enables people to develop motions and reactions that haven’t yet been programmed into the app.
Anki has discussed making Cozmo a more intelligent home assistant that can blend facial recognition with smart home appliance functionality, but that’s just one path they might take with the basic concept. Currently, the AI capabilities of Cozmo far exceed the most commonly purchased AI products (Alexa, phone-based assistants). However, as Anki the company grows, so will Cozmo and Anki’s inevitable new products.
Why Anki is a Baby Unicorn:
- Depth, breadth, and vision of leadership team, many of whom are thought-leaders in the field of AI
- Recognized by Fast Company as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Robotics
- To date, raised $157.5M in four rounds of funding, with investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Two Sigma, JPMorgan, and Index Ventures
- #1 selling toy on Amazon U.S. for past two years; became 2017’s #1 toy in UK and France after launching globally in September 2017
What’s in the Stack!?
Here’s a little bit on what they’re working with in their tech stack: Drupal, nginx, Varnish, Foundation, AWS, jQuery, PHP, Go, Python, BI data stores (Amazon Redshift, Vertica, DynamoDB, hbase, cassandra), transport systems (Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, Flume, Scribe), C/C++, and Deep Learning frameworks like TensorFlow, Caffe, etc.
Know someone looking?
Anki is growing fast (world-wide) and looking for talent from senior AI, Cloud and Automation engineers to product, operations, marketing, and support roles.
Want to join the team at Anki?
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