Non ho ben capito cosa possa fare per me, ma è in grado di riconoscere un volto e reagire a diverse situazioni, in maniera piuttosto adorabile.
The real appeal of Cozmo, though, comes in what Anki is calling an emotion engine, which powers a wide range of different states the robot is capable of emulating. Drawing from academic psychology, those different states — happy, calm, brave, confident, and excited, to name a few — are derived from combinations of the big five personality traits used to describe the human psyche. By mixing and mashing these traits as if they were colors, Cozmo can replicate a surprisingly complex range of human-like emotions.
To create these emotion states for Cozmo, Anki began drawing from the expertise of former Pixar animator Carlos Baena, who was hired last year to help the company hone its animation. The company utilizes Maya, an industry-standard animation tool, to render various actions for Cozmo. “We wrote a huge amount of software inside of Maya to allow our animators not to animate a movie, but an actual robot,” Tappeiner says. Anki requires its animators to test out each new sequence on a physical Cozmo prototype at their desks.