Amazon Astro Is One Small Step for Robotkind

Amazon's helper bot is a significant milestone for robots, but it's not the giant leap I was expecting.

Amazon's Astro is a landmark in the field of consumer robots. We're testing it right now as we prepare to give it a full review, but it doesn't actually have to be good to be important. Just the fact that it exists and is already in people's homes is a huge step that many ambitious robots have failed to reach.

I've enthusiastically covered the consumer robots on display at trade shows like CES for years. One of my biggest wishes for the industry is a fully capable bot that can act like Rosie the Robot from the classic cartoon The Jetsons -- one capable of cleaning up after me and doing basic chores.

Astro is cool to behold, but it's a far cry from Rosie. In fact, another Jetsons character inspired its name: Astro the robo-dog. Sure, Amazon's robot is the first of its kind with real potential to reach many customers. But -- for better or worse -- the pet-like approach seems more geared toward winning people's hearts (and money) than creating a highly capable helper-robot. Astro is a step forward in robot evolution, but I was hoping for a bigger one.

The ghost of Kuri
At CES 2017, I had the chance to play with Kuri, a robot from Mayfield Robotics. Kuri could autonomously map your home and travel to different rooms on command. Kuri had cute, expressive eyes. Kuri had built-in cameras that you could check from an app while you were out and about. Kuri would respond to voice commands and play games while you were around and act as a security sentry while you weren't.

Kuri was supposed to officially roll out to customers in December 2017 for $800. I saw it in action at CES in January 2017 and felt good about the company's chances to deliver on that promise. It was already rolling around well and responding to commands. The app was up and running. Mayfield Robotics was a startup, but it was backed by appliance giant Bosch.

Instead, in July 2018 Mayfield Robotics officially canceled production of Kuri. Now, more than five years after I first saw Kuri in action, we have Astro. Amazon first showed off Astro at a fall 2021 press event. It's now rolling out to customers on an invite-only basis for $1,000. I've seen Astro in action -- not under the tutelage of its design team at a press event, but navigating the CNET Smart Home on its own.

In terms of features, Astro has expressive eyes and responds to voice commands. It has built-in cameras and can act as a sentry while you're away. It maps your home and can travel to different rooms. In a lot of ways, it is the resurrected ghost of Kuri, just made by a tech giant instead of an ambitious startup.

Kuri could have been a win for a little guy in a way that Amazon's Astro never will be. Some of Astro's features are beholden to a subscription to one of its parent company's subsidiaries: You need a Ring Protect Plan subscription to unlock Astro's abilities to patrol your home on its own.

Astro's connection to Ring and Amazon also raises legitimate privacy concerns. Ring's messy history with privacy policies and police partnerships is well documented at this point, and Astro connects the company to a roving bot with multiple cameras that also knows your floor plan.

Amazon, to its credit, has put some safeguards into place. Astro can recognize faces, for instance, but it processes that info locally. Likewise, it stores most of its mapping information on-device. But if you want to check your camera while you're on the road, that necessitates using the cloud.

That's not to suggest Kuri wouldn't have used the cloud; it almost certainly would have. In fact, it's highly possible that a startup like Mayfield Robotics would have had less capacity for high-level security than a giant with near-limitless resources like Amazon -- but it also would have been less of a target.

Plus, I'd have been less concerned with how Mayfield Robotics was using my data. Again, Amazon is saying the right things on this front for now, but Astro requires you to trust a giant company with highly private data.

The Astro of the future
Astro isn't actually the only available consumer gadget that makes use of robotics. Sony's Aibo is a cute robot dog. Jibo was a robot that could answer your questions, but couldn't move. Ubtech has a yoga-teaching robot called the Lynx. Robot vacuums similarly have a lot of built-in navigation tech and higher end models can map your floors, too.