TuSimple and Waymo are in the lead in the emerging sector of autonomous trucking; TuSimple founder Xiaodi Hou and Waymo trucking head Boris Sofman had an in-depth discussion of their industry and the tech they're building at TC Mobility 2020. Interestingly, while they're solving for the same problems, they have very different backgrounds and approaches. Hou and Sofman started out by talking about why they were pursuing the trucking market in the first place. "The market is massive; I think in the United States, $700-$800 billion a year is spent on the trucking industry. It's continuing to grow every single year," said Sofman, who joined Waymo from Anki last year to lead the effort in freight.

There are plenty of toy robots out on the market, but few are as endearing as the upcoming Anki Vector. Its big bright eyes are most reminiscent of the Pixar character Wall-E. But as cute as its Wall-E-like personality is, it doesn't mean much if the robot isn't smart. That's where Alexa comes in. In a blog post by CEO and co-founder Boris Sofman, he notes one of the top requests on the Vector Kickstarter was to integrate Alexa.

BOSTON – Personal home robots that can socialize with people are starting to roll out of the laboratory and into our living rooms and kitchens. But are humans ready to invite them into their lives? It's taken decades of research to build robots even a fraction as sophisticated as those featured in popular science fiction. They don't much resemble their fictional predecessors; they mostly don't walk, only sometimes roll and often lack limbs. Worse, they're so far losing out to immobile smart speakers made by Amazon, Apple and Google, which cost a fraction of what early social robots do, and which are powered by artificial-intelligence systems that leave many robots' limited abilities in the dust.

Someday, Boris Sofman wants families to sit down and debate: cat, dog or robot? Sofman is the chief executive and founder of Anki, a robotics company that's made its mark in the toy world since launching its first product in 2013, a set of smart racing cars. It followed that product's success with a toy robot called Cozmo in 2016, which the company says is the best-selling toy on Amazon in the United States, the United Kingdom and France. A new product, Vector, launched Tuesday on Kickstarter and offers the first hint of Anki's broader consumer robotics ambitions. "Our north star . . . is to have a robot in every home," Sofman said in an interview with The Washington Post.

In my many years testing all sorts of gadgets, few things have elicited as much spontaneous joy as Anki's Cozmo, its adorable robot for kids. Mostly, that was because it had a personality. Behind all of the sensors, cameras and other hardware, there was a team of animators breathing life into it. Now, Anki is taking everything it learned from Cozmo and putting it in a bigger, more powerful home robot: Vector. And unlike Cozmo, you won't need a phone to play with it.

It was cool, but it was also a bit confounding. What was Apple trying to tell us about its future plans by showing us this particular company? Right after the keynote, one of the company's PR people emailed me to ask if I wanted to meet with Anki's CEO Boris Sofman, a Carnegie Mellon robotics guy (as are his two cofounders Hanns Tappeiner and Mark Palatucci). I accepted, mostly so I could find out what got Apple so excited about this little toy startup. Of course, they'd hate to be called a toy startup.

With that, Boris Sofman pulled a diminutive white toy out of a soft lunchbox, and began showing it off. After a brief introduction, Sofman set the little robot into its charging cradle, at which point it came to life in the way that all living beings recharge: It slept. I could tell Cozmo was sleeping because of the audio that was emanating from the speaker on his head: the sound of snoring. In between the purrs of his breaths, I heard a few seconds of music on what sounded like clarinet and strings. It was an expectant melody, a signal that Cozmo was ready to greet the day.

Drawing from artificial intelligence (AI) advances that often don't trickle down to consumers out of the commercial sector, the company behind the Overdrive robotic cars is preparing to ship an animated little bot. Anki's Cozmo, with its machine learning and dynamic personality, is redefining the term "bringing toys to life." Anki describes Cozmo as being a real-life version of the type of robot companions seen in films. When watching the little soda-can-sized robot take in the world around it, Pixar's Wall-E comes to mind. Cozmo can get around the real world using a set of caterpillar tracks, the continuous tracking technology that's often employed in tank designs.

Just 2.5-inches tall with a fondness for meaningful eye contact and heavy lifting, Cozmo is a robot companion designed to seem like it has a soul. And like any faux-sentient creature, he gets grumpy when he's poked or turned on his back. You can tell by the way his eyes narrow and he grunts at you. Cozmo looks like a lot of toy robots on the market (and Pixar's Wall-E), but he's been programmed to move, interact, and emote like a complicated movie character. His creators at Anki designed him using a combination of artificial intelligence, image and voice recognition, and animation.

Cozmo is a 179 artificially intelligent robot that can recognize faces and react to human gestures. SAN FRANCISCO – At first glance, the palm-sized toy on the table looks unexceptional, an odd cross between a bulldozer and a forklift. Except that the toy is snoring. Suddenly, it wakes up, motors over to its human inquisitor and lets out a happy squawk as its digital eyes go wide. Made by Anki, the start-up that has found success with its self-driving Anki Drive racing cars, Cozmo goes on sale today for 179 with orders shipping this fall.