Astro Robot

October 5, 2021

WHY IN THE NEWS?

Recently, Amazon has unveiled its ‘Astro’ home robot, which is designed to help customers with a range of tasks like home monitoring and keeping in touch with family.

However, civil society has highlighted the concerns of privacy issues of 24×7 surveillance

About:

About Astro Robot:
- Astro is primed to be a home security device. It 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 the home.
- It is basically a combination of the Echo Show (smart speaker) 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 can recognise the faces of people and analyse them until it figures out if it’s a family member or an outsider.

Issues Related to Privacy:

Civil society is worried that the amount of data Amazon gets to fetch with the Astro, giving the company easy access to the household,
- This is going one step beyond Alexa which had access to vocals and sound until now.
- Amazon has asserted that Astro stores face data locally rather than in the cloud, but it is still a privacy concern as with any internet-connected device.
There are concerns of stealing or hacking of the device. Due to this, the perpetrator can get access to the digital map that the robot creates of someone’s home.
The prime concern, in the long-run, could contribute to greater public acceptance of Artificial Intelligence-powered surveillance.
- In the past, hackers have managed to access Ring cameras, used in the devices of Amazon technologies.

Other Recent Experiments:

Softbank earlier this year “suspended” the production of Pepper, one of the first humanoid robots able to “read” emotions.
Jibo has started an Indiegogo project, which aims to build a world’s first social robot for the home