A mini robot powered by your phone Keller Rinaudo
so just by a show of hands how many of
you all have a robot at home not very
many of you okay and and and actually of
those hands if you don’t include room by
how many of you have a robot at home
okay so a couple that’s okay that’s the
problem that we’re trying to solve it
remote ofthat I and the other 20 nerds
that remote of are obsessed with solving
so we really want to build a robot that
anyone can use whether you’re eight or
eighty as it turns out that’s a really
hard problem because you have to build a
small portable robot it’s not only
really affordable but it has to be
something that people actually want to
take home and have around their kids
this robot can’t be creepy or uncanny he
should be friendly and cute so meet Romo
Romo’s a robot that uses a device you
already know and love your iPhone as his
brain and by leveraging the power of the
iphones processor we can create a robot
that is Wi-Fi enabled and computer
vision capable for a hundred and fifty
bucks which is about 1% of what these
kinds of robots have cost in the past
when Romo wakes up he’s in creature mode
so he’s actually using the video camera
on the device to follow my face if I
duck down he’ll follow me hes wery so
he’ll keep his eyes on me if i come over
here he’ll turn to follow me if i come
over here you smart he’s if I get too
close to him oh he gets scared just like
any other creature so in a lot of ways
Romo’s like a pet that has a mind of his
own thanks little guy bless you and if I
want if I want to explore the world oh
we’re almost tired if I want to explore
the world with Roma I can actually
connect him from any other iOS device so
here’s the ipad and Roma will actually
stream video to this device so i can see
everything that Romo sees and I get a
robot side view of the world now this is
a free app on the App Store so if any of
you guys had this app on your phones we
could literally
now share control of the robot and play
games together so I’ll show you really
quickly Romo actually hes streaming
videos so you can see me and the entire
Ted audience but I get in front of romo
here and if I want to control him I can
just drive so I can drive them around
and I can take pictures of you I’ve
always wanted a picture of a 1500 person
Ted audience so I’ll snap a picture and
in the same way that you scroll through
content on an iPad I can actually adjust
the angle of the camera on the device so
there are all of you through Romo’s eyes
it so and finally because Romo is an
extension of me I can express myself
through his emotion so I can go in and I
can say let’s make Romo excited but the
most important thing about romo is that
we wanted to create something that was
literally completely intuitive you do
not have to teach someone how to drive
Romo in fact who would like to drive a
robot okay awesome here you go thank you
Scott an even cooler you actually don’t
have to be in the same geographic
location as the robot to to control him
so you can imagine so he actually
streams two-way audio and video between
any two smart devices so you can log in
through the browser it’s kind of like
skype on wheels so we’re talking before
about telepresence and this is a really
cool example you can imagine an
eight-year-old girl for example who has
an iphone and her mom buys row robot
that girl can take her iphone put it on
the robot send an email to grandma who
lives on the other side of the country
grandma can log into that robot and play
hide-and-go-seek with her granddaughter
for 15 minutes every single night when
otherwise she might only be able to get
to see your granddaughter once or twice
a year thanks Scott
so those are a couple of the really cool
things that Romo can do today but I just
want to finish by talking about
something that we’re working on in the
future this is actually something that
one of our engineers Don built in a
weekend it’s built on top of a Google
open framework called blockley this
allows you to drag and drop these blocks
of semantic code and create any behavior
for this robot you want you do not have
to know how to code to create a behavior
for Romo and you can actually simulate
that behavior in the browser which is
what you see Romo doing on the left and
then if you have something you like you
can download it onto your robot and
execute it in real life run the program
in real life and then if you have
something you’re proud of you can share
it with every other person who owns a
robot in the world so all of these Wi-Fi
enabled robots actually learn from each
other the reason we’re so focused on
building robots that everyone can train
is that we think the most compelling use
cases in personal robotics are personal
they changed from person to person so we
think that if you’re going to have a
robot in your home that robot ought to
be a manifestation of your own
imagination so I wish that I could tell
you what the / the future of personal
robotics looks like to be honest I have
no idea but what we do know is that it
isn’t ten years or ten billion dollars
or a large humanoid robot away the
future of personal robotics is happening
today and it’s going to depend on small
agile robots like Romo and the
creativity of people like yourselves so
we can’t wait to get you all robots and
we can’t wait to see what you build
thank