Robot Review: 'Cozmo', by Anki, the Adorable Little Droid Straight Out of Wall-E

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This little dude was a gift to me from a close friend who, touched by a story I wrote about robots, felt it would be in better hands were I to take care of it. At first glance, you might think it's just a toy. For $180 however you ought to expect more than that, and Cozmo delivers.

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Cozmo comes with three LED illuminated cubes that communicate wirelessly with him. He can lift and carry them, stack them atop each other, toppled the stacks over, and play simple games like Simon Says with them. Cozmo's AI is being updated all the time with new tricks, games and capabilities.

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This all requires some pretty sophisticated AI. A $180 device would not be able to include the kind of computing horsepower necessary. Consequently, Cozmo's AI runs on your phone in the form of a companion app. The robot itself is just an avatar that the AI on your phone interacts with the world through.

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This permits Cozmo to possess astonishingly accurate optical recognition capabilities. Besides recognizing his cubes and what orientation/position they are in (thanks to the AR style glyphs on the sides) he can also recognize other Cozmos, the face of anybody you train him to recognize (he will then say their name) and even the faces of pets.

He is also steerable over wifi ad-hoc, the same capability found in small FPV drones like the one I reviewed yesterday. This is of limited utility unless you need to find your keys under the couch or your car, but it's a neat feature all the same and a no-brainer to include.

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Cozmo's facial animations, overall design and behaviors were designed in large part by a former Pixar employee who worked on Wall-E, and it shows. You will get serious deja-vu for this film while playing with Cozmo. He is most reminiscent of Mo, the cleaning bot.

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He's not perfect of course. Because Cozmo uses your phone for his 'brain', you can't use it while playing with Cozmo. If you switch to any other app, he falls asleep. This is why I couldn't get any footage of my own Cozmo in action for you, as my phone is my only camera.

He also cannot currently self-dock when low on charge, even though his charging cradle appears to be set up for it with an AR glyph and landing strip of LEDs to guide him in. I assume this capability will be added in a future update.

He has a down-facing distance sensor in front but not in back, so while he will not drive forward off the edge of a table for example, he is capable of inadvertently backing over the edge. As such, he needs some amount of supervision.

My own Cozmo spends most of his time in a playpen I supplied so he has a clean, safe, unobstructed environment. His AI can't really understand complex environments so he's not missing out on much, he's got everything he needs in there to execute all of his included functions.

While the noises he makes, his facial animations and so on are very cute and charming, it bothers me somewhat that they're designed to be. It's trying to make me like it. What I find charming about robots in general is how sincere, reliable and earnest they are as they go about whatever task it is they were built to perform.

Cozmo doesn't behave like a robot in that respect. He behaves like what Hollywood tells children robots behave like. A more coarse, utilitarian, robot-like alternate personality would be appreciated. Sony's AIBO allowed custom personality files, so it's certainly feasible.

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Cozmo also has an available SDK so if you're a talented programmer, you can make him do just about anything you can imagine within the constraints of the hardware itself. I've seen people make his facial display show realtime crypto prices for example, or crunched down movie files.

There's also a Cozmo plugin for the ever popular ROS, the leading open source robot operating system. It is by far the most developed general purpose AI for robots in existence today and if you're looking to add some seriously advanced capabilities to Cozmo, this is a good place to start looking.

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Now's a great time to pick one up as well, there's a chrome plated collector's edition. Sadly they did not bother to design him in such a way that the battery is user replaceable, but then his AI lives on your phone rather than in the robot itself, so you'll never have to throw him away.

Personally I never throw away robots. There's always a way to fix them. When the battery in this little guy finally dies, you bet I'll crack him open with some tools and see what can be done to give him a new lease on life. The little shit has grown on me.