Amazon makes Astro a robo watchdog for corporate use – t3n – digital pioneers

Astro: Amazon robot will soon monitor companies. (Image: Amazon)

The home robot Astro, presented in 2021, has been given new functions. The small Amazon robot should now recognize pets and open windows, but – with ring support – will soon be able to patrol companies as a robo watchdog.

At Amazon’s fall event 2021, the cute home robot Astro was THE attraction. Similar to iRobot’s cleaning robots, Astro should be able to move around the house relatively freely.

Instead of vacuuming or wiping, Astro has the task of monitoring the apartment or house and communicating. The mini-robot uses its integrated periscope camera to check whether the stove is off. Corresponding images are then sent to the users via the app.

In addition, one should be able to communicate with other people via Astro – for example via a video call. In the future, the robot should therefore make life easier for older people in particular.

So far there is only the robot as a so-called day-one edition for $1,000 – by special invitation. Astro will later cost $1,450. This pricing is also something like Amazon’s admission that the robot is simply not finished.

Nevertheless, there should have been hundreds of thousands of inquiries. Amazon states that it wants to give the astro robot new functions that the pilot users particularly want. One such new feature is now available: pet detection.

Astro recognizes dogs and cats and sends videos when they move. However, the robot cannot distinguish between certain movements in which a notification is made, such as individual pets, such as Techcrunch writes. The underlying training model is specialized for dogs and cats.

Thanks to Ring support, which is already available in the previous Astro model, the robot can carry out certain monitoring mechanisms, such as activating sirens or barking dogs. Automatic patrol routes can also be set.

With the help of the new ring cameras Spotlight Cam Plus and Pro, which were also presented at the Amazon hardware event, Astro should be able to be transformed into a robo watchdog for company use in the future. The corresponding functions are to be tested in a number of companies in the coming months.

In this way, the robot could check on its own if an alarm was triggered in the company. The cameras can then be used to determine what is going on. If, for example, there has been a break-in, the police could be alerted via Ring’s security centers.

In order to be able to give Astro more functions like the ones currently presented, Amazon is making a specially developed SDK available to robotics students at three US universities. These should come up with applications that can then be made available by third-party developers for the appropriate platform.