Amazon unveils new home robot ‘Astro’ for providing assistance in day-to-day activities

E-commerce giant Amazon has recently unveiled a home robot named Astro. The Astro is the company’s first home robot. This home robot can be useful in assisting users at their home and make their lives easier.

Amazon has designed the Astro to carry various activities like home monitoring, setting up personal routine, reminders and many others. Astro can also play music and TV shows while moving inside the house. The Astro robot has a digital screen mounted on wheels. In order to make its design appear human friendly, Astro has two digital eyes on it. For many animated movie enthusiast, the robot might look similar to that of Wall-E robot in a movie of the same name (Wall-E). The Star Wars movies’ fans can also find the design of the robot familiar.

The Astro Robot comes with a visual ID (a computer vision feature) which enables users to teach the robot about their schedule. This helps Astro to deliver a reminder to you or connect you to a specific person through a call. Astro also features a cargo bin which serves as a utilitarian purpose. Users can store any item in Astro’s cargo bin and remind the robot to bring it when needed.

The robot features a dedicated microphone/ camera-off button similar to Echo devices. Users have to enable the button for turning the recording off. A red LED light along with a red status indicator turns on when the recording is off. When the recording button is turned on Astro captures video and audio of the inside of your house and streams it to the cloud. The LED light on the top of its periscope turns green, when video is streamed. However, Amazon clarifies that all the video captured by the robot is not sent to the cloud. The robot streams the cloud when users use features like live view on Astro app, video calling or video recording.

In terms of price the Astro robot will be available at an introductory offer of $999 (approx. Rs 74,200). After that it will costs $1449 (approx. Rs 1,07,500). The company is expected to deliver the Astro robots in USA by the year-end. It remains unknown when Amazon will make the robot available in India.

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