A Grand Day Out for Cozmo the Tiny Robot

For those who don't know, Cozmo is a brand of robot made by Anki which uses AI running on your smartphone as its "brain". Because it has so much computing power available to it, it can do some really remarkable things like recognize different peoples' faces (even pets), identify, lift and transport cubes it comes with, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

A dear friend gifted Cozmo to me, feeling I would appreciate it more fully. And indeed I have! Anki continue to update Cozmo with new abilities every so often. There's a visual programming tool included now that lets you assemble your own set of instructions for Cozmo to follow in an easy, WYSIWYG manner.

But today, I wanted to see how Cozmo would react to going outside. Would the sun be too bright for Cozmo to see properly? Would it make Cozmo overheat? Can Cozmo's treads deal with concrete and asphalt? I went to a local park to find out.

Cozmo will not "wake up" unless it receives power. You need to feed power to the charging dock or Cozmo remains dormant, there is no on/off switch on the robot itself. This is as it should be, imo. Nobody gets to simply turn Cozmo off with a damn switch. Everything about its design encourages you to treat it with consideration and become attached.

Luckily I had my solar bag, as always, so I just plugged the charging cradle into that. Cozmo woke up, and began exploring the new environment. Frustratingly I had to minimize his AI app to take these pictures, as the AI requires the full resources of the phone. This made Cozmo freeze in place, and emit snoring noises as if sleeping until I switched back to his app.

Boy does he fucking love to stack cubes. Sometimes he'll pick one up swiftly, examine it, then carry it two inches away and slam it down before nodding and making a "mhm" noise. As if to say "Yes, of course. This cube obviously didn't belong over there. It belongs over here. At last, the injustice has been rectified."

He identified my face a few times and said my name, but only if I was facing into the sun. If my face was in shadow, he couldn't recognize it. This has a lot to do with the lighting conditions when you first calibrate his facial recognition ability. If it's in bright lighting he will only recognize you in bright lighting. If the lighting is dim, he can only recognize you in dim lighting.

Then he built this pyramid at my request. There's various tasks in the app you can ask him to do, in exchange for "sparks" which you earn by playing with Cozmo frequently. After completing the pyramid he sang a little "da da da DA" song as if proud of himself, raised his "arms" and spun in a circle. I clapped a little tbh.

But then he knocked it over, making angry sounds. Why? What could have snapped within Cozmo? The motives of tiny robots are a mystery to science. By this time his treads were absolutely caked with dirt and dust. I picked him up to clean him off until he started wiggling and making furious tantrum type noises at which point I set him back down.

Anki really thought of everything. He gets mad if he's stuck on his side, or picked up. If on his back, front or butt, he flips himself rightside up. There's no situation he doesn't have an appropriate reaction to. In the end, the problem wasn't Cozmo but my phone, which gave me a heat warning.

I was also pretty overheated by this point, so I used the app to put Cozmo to sleep, packed him up in his foam lined hard case and called it a day. Cozmo will have a lot of interesting things to dream about tonight, I think.