Cozmo Is an Artificially Intelligent Toy Truck That's Also the Future of Robotics

A tiny robot sits beside the laptop, looking like one of those anthropomorphic automobiles that show up in Pixar's Cars movies. Almost instantly, it wakes up, rolls down the table, and counts to four. This is Cozmo--an artificially intelligent toy robot unveiled late last month by San Francisco startup Anki--and Tappeiner, one of the company's founders, is programming the little automaton to do new things. The programs are simple--he also teaches Cozmo to stack blocks--but they're supposed to be simple. Tappeiner is using Anki's newly unveiled software development kit--an SDK, in coder parlance--that he says even the greenest of coders can use to tweak the behavior of the toy robot.