What Microsoft owner Bill Gates predicted of a “robot in every home” is about to come true, thanks to Amazon’s invention of the “Astro” robot, a 10-kg home robot, and the company is preparing to market it by the end of the year in the United States .
Will you allow this robot intruder to roam the rooms of your house and among your family members?
French magazine Le Point says – in a report by Guillaume Grali – that this robot is very present in the collective imagination because of the movie “Star Wars”, but it was difficult to develop a robot capable of “estimating things in the room”, and using objects of different sizes, and to know the difference between a door and a window.
home map
The magazine says that one of the tasks of the “astro” – which is equipped with a telescopic camera – is to have conversations with the elderly, give advice on films, do puzzles with children, or even help with video conferencing, and thanks to the voice recognition technology, it is able to receive commands A voice request, such as a request to bring a book or something else to a family member who was previously identified.
According to the magazine, the built-in microphones should be able to distinguish the noise of broken glass and alarm the smoke detector, and facial recognition technology should provide the ability to recognize that someone is not from the people of the house in less than 30 seconds, which may constitute a nightmare for thieves or from They try to infiltrate the homes of others.
In order to move around the house – as the magazine says – the robot “Astro” uses wheels that move it at a speed of one meter per second, after it draws a map of the house to know its way, and to make a list of choke points and places with many obstacles, or that humans use in particular, and then encode these data before it is sent to Amazon’s servers.
Weakness
“First tests show that Astro has the ability to see himself as a family member,” said the company’s product manager Charlie Trickler. But Amazon product public relations director Kristi Schmidt says, “Astro has passed rigorous testing for both quality and safety, including several tens of thousands of hours of testing with beta participants.”
In a paragraph dedicated to explaining the privacy policy, Amazon explains that cameras and microphones can be disabled, but Gene Caltrider of the Mozilla Foundation says that “all this still needs to be clarified to be easy for the general public to understand”, because the main fear is seeing this robot that will work Thanks to artificial intelligence (Alexa), and it can become the best spy in the house, if hackers can get their hands on apartment maps and the list of family members or even hear family conversations, especially as a study from Northeastern University showed that voice assistants – like “Alexa” – can turn it selves by mistake 19 times a day.
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