We Met Cozmo at a Preview Event

Recently, me and Marcello went down to London to meet with Pat DeNeale, VP of business development over at Anki. We also met with a few other members of the team, who are the guys who created the awesome Overdrive.

Cozmo was released in the USA in 2016, and was the second best toy throughout the country. There was a huge demand for Cozmo in the US, and after seeing it in person I believe that there will be a huge demand for it in the UK too.

We didn't just go to London for a cup of tea and a chat though -- we got to see Anki’s newest product, who is as awesome as his name suggests he is. Cozmo is a robot specifically designed to be the coolest robot you will ever see.

Cozmo is a toy designed to keep your entire family entertained. He does a pretty good job at keeping people happy, and has a few things that he can do to keep kids engaged aswell, such as playing keep-away, building blocks and a cool mini-game that involves putting your reflexes to the ultimate test. The core values when designing Cozmo were vision, sensory, animatronics and AI (artificial intelligence).

Another huge feature of Cozmo is the games that he can play,which are all equally entertaining. One game is called keep-away and this is basically where you have a cube and you have to keep it away from Cozmo while he tries to tap it. This was pretty fun to play and could keep you busy for a while. Another game that Cozmo plays is a memory game, basically it uses 2 cubes for 1 player or 3 cubes for 2 players. What happens is the cubes that are in use will start flashing different colours and the aim of the game is to tap when the colours are all the same. But beware don't tap when all the colours are red or you will lose and your opponents will gain a point. This game was also quite fun and was my personal favourite from all the games that we played with Cozmo. Another game is a tapping game, which challenges your reflexes and provides great fun while doing so. What happens during this game is that you and Cozmo will have a cube each, and both cubes will start changing colours simultaneously. When both colours match you will have to tap the cube as fast as possible, if you are lucky you will beat Cozmo. Like most of the games it is a best of five between you and Cozmo to decide who is the best, good luck he is incredibly fast.

Cozmo has 360 parts packed inside of him, 1.4 million lines of code programmed into him and 866 different animations that he can perform. He kinda reminds me of Wall-E from Pixar, that isn't a huge coincidence, as a number of Pixar and Dreamwork animators helped design the look of Cozmo and the emotions that are displayed on his face. Cozmo is surprisingly small for a robot that can do the stuff he can.

He will do a number of things, but perhaps the coolest trick I saw him do in the short time was his explorer mode. Cozmo will basically explore and learn new things about the environment. An example was when Cozmo was exploring the table, he saw the edge and stopped himself from going further because he knew that he would fall off.

Cozmo also comes with a cool app that lets you do a variety of different things. Like using him as a camera, putting Cozmo on charge and even telling him to perform different tricks. The coolest use from the app is that it requires most of Cozmo’s computing to be done through your phone.

Another huge aspect of Cozmo is the SDK, which basically allows you to programme him to do a number of things. The possibilities are endless. This is incredible and could help make Cozmo a great product.

So after spending time with Cozmo, I cannot wait for its release September 15th 2017. It’s an impressive product -- for anyone who dreamed of having their own personal robot, your dreams may just be coming true.