Recently, Amazon introduced its first house robot.
The long-rumored $999 Astro home robot was introduced by Amazon.
Astro seems like an odd product for Amazon to release. Notably, Astro is a “Day 1 Edition” product, which denotes that it won’t initially be made available to everyone. Instead, Amazon will request registration before inviting users to order the robot. This enables Amazon to avoid producing too many products that it won’t sell and a public failure like the 2015-era Amazon Fire Phone.
Amazon did not provide a particular launch date but did state that Astro will go on sale later this year. It’s important to note that Amazon has made similar claims regarding upcoming products that either never materialized or had significant delays.
What is Astro?
The size of Astro is comparable to a small dog. It has three wheels that it uses to move about your home, two large ones for traction and a smaller one for rotation. It has a camera that can monitor your house when Astro patrols while you’re away, rising up on a 42-inch arm. It can follow you around and use its 10-inch touchscreen to play music or show TV programmes. If you want to, you may pack up two sodas in the back storage compartment and instruct Astro to go to someone in the living room because it can distinguish faces.
Astro is essentially a combination of many of Amazon’s other devices mounted on wheels. The cameras can be used with Amazon’s Ring cameras and its Echo Show smart screens to provide home security or video chat capabilities. When you first set up Astro, a map of your home is also made using the cameras. To acquire the weather or sports scores, you can converse with Astro in a manner similar to that of an Echo or Alexa (whose name you can alter if you choose). As with an Amazon tablet or Fire TV, you can watch movies or TV shows on your computer.
Astro can be remotely controlled through a smartphone app, which is helpful if you want to monitor a loved one who lives alone, such as an elderly family member. A third-party insert developed by Omron that can fit into the back storage compartment and carry a blood pressure cuff will also be available on Amazon. This makes Astro more accessible to people outside of gadget nerds who desire a house robot by enabling remote control of Astro and reminding those who live alone to check their blood pressure.
