Domestic robots are sort of here, with self-driving and speakers that control your smart home, but Mayfield Robotics’ Kuri could be the first real home robot, combining mobility and true interaction with approachable, friendly design.
Mayfield Robotics is a startup fully owned and funded by Bosch, with a team of co-founders that have extensive experience in the field of robotics, but also in interaction design and machine learning. Their first product is Kuri , an intelligent home robot making its official debut at CES this year, with pre-orders beginning in the U. S. and a target ship date of sometime during the holidays in 2017.
Kuri responds to voice input, and in this way is similar to other devices like Google Home or Amazon Echo. There’s a four-microphone array built into its compact, vaguely conical body so that it can hear you no matter where you are in the room, and it has a speaker built-in, too. But Kuri doesn’t respond with words; instead, it uses sounds, lights and its expressive eyes to communicate responses back to a user – all of which is a key part of its design.
The robot also has a built-in HD camera tucked behind one eye, and a range of sensors to stop it falling down stairs or bumping into furniture. it moves on a three wheels that help it rotate in any direction, and move from room to room with easy as it follows you around the house or goes where you tell it. There’s a processor on board to handle tasks like voice and image recognition processing locally, and it’s programmable through easy tools like IFTTT to expand its feature set.
The diminutive robot is only under two feet tall, and about a foot wide with a total weight of 14 lbs. Both iOS and Android apps are available to help control and interact with Kuri when you’re not using him (Mayfield genders the robot male in press materials and conversation) and it also seeks out its charging pad when its battery needs topping up.
