A year after the official announcement, Amazon Astro's home robot received several updates. It learned to observe, detect pets, but most importantly, the manufacturer prepared a set of SDK, which allows outside developers to add new opportunities to the machine.
The feedback about Amazon Astro from almost the first day was skeptic — the $1,000 device was more regarded as an expensive toy with minimal practical utility, and even months after the annotation, the robot's mass supply never started. Now the machine is able to operate as a mobile security system -- it recognizes and checks certain windows and doors in the house, supplementing the permanent cameras from Amazon, in particular smart door calls from Ring. Moreover, the picture from the robot is available for viewing through the same application.
Astro has also learned to recognize pets and send video to the owner when their movement is detected. Unfortunately, the robot has not yet been able to distinguish the pet -- it has been trained in the basic model with dogs and cats, but no more than that -- although it is likely that this possibility will emerge, because Astro's people are different.
Finally, Amazon has developed SDK, a set of tools for the development of external software, which will be handed over this year to engineers from three American universities: the University of Michigan, the Technical Institute of Georgia, and the University of Maryland. It is expected that robotic students will be able to expand the machine's capabilities with the help of external software. As in the case of much of modern consumer electronics, Amazon is likely to position Astro as a platform whose capabilities depend on downloadable applications.