Amazon’s Astro ‘robot on wheels’

Subject – Science and Tech

Context – Amazon’s Astro ‘robot on wheels’ has rankled privacy crusaders

Concept –

Amazon last week announced many new products including a “home robot” named Astro. The robot has cartoony-eyes on a tablet-like touchscreen and comes equipped with a periscope camera and microphone, and can autonomously navigate your house to keep a tab on security or follow you around while you’re on a video call.
Astro is the most ambitious product Amazon has made after its Echo smart speaker that helped the company create an ecosystem of household products.
Amazon is calling the device an engineering breakthrough, but the e-commerce giant’s big bet on turning science-fiction into reality has invited privacy concerns, raising alarm bells over putting a 24×7 surveillance robot at home.

What is Astro?

Astro weighs about 20 pounds and is two feet tall, essentially a robot dog on wheels. Astro also happens to be the name of the non-robotic dog in The Jetsons.
The robot is designed to move around the home and keep a check on pets, and detect something unusual in the absence of the owner.
It comes with a “periscope” camera that pops up from its head and can be used to keep an eye on your home.
Astro is basically a combination of the Echo Show and sophisticated Ring security camera integrated into one single device.
The device captures live videos, recognises faces, plays music or videos, and delivers a beer across the home.
It’s an innovative product that takes advantage of Amazon’s expertise in artificial intelligence and uses cameras and sensors to see and follow you around the home.

Astro is a surveillance machine

What’s worrying many is the amount of data Amazon gets to fetch with the Astro, giving the company easy access to the household, going one step beyond Alexa which has its ears open all the time.
Having a security camera stationed at one corner of a room is less problematic than one on wheels. And, this is a robot that can recognise the faces of people and analyse them until it figures out if it’s a family member or an outsider.
Astro stores face data locally rather than in the cloud, but it is still a
privacy concern as with any internet-connected device.