Astro Robot

06 Oct 2021 Astro Robot

Posted at 15:43h in Daily current-affairs by khyati khare 0 Comments

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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 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 analyses 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.

Robotics is a branch of engineering that involves the conception, design, manufacture and operation of robots.
Robot is any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort.
The objective of the robotics field is to create intelligent machines that can assist humans in a variety of ways.

Advantages:

In many situations robots can increase productivity, efficiency, quality and consistency of products.
Robots can work in environments which are unsafe for humans as they don’t have the same environmental requirements that humans do – such as lighting, air conditioning or noise protection.
Robots have some sensors/actuators which are more capable than humans.
Unlike humans, robots don’t get bored. Until they wear out, they can do the same thing again and again.
They can be very accurate – to fractions of an inch (as is needed for example in manufacturing of microelectronics).

Disadvantages:

The use of robots can create economic problems if they replace human jobs.
Robots can only do what they are told to do – they can’t improvise
This means that safety procedures are needed to protect humans and other robots.
Although robots can be superior to humans in some ways, they are less dexterous than humans.
Robotics lack emotional intelligence, which plays a critical role in intense situations.
Often robots are very costly– in terms of the initial cost, maintenance, the need for extra components and the need to be programmed to do the task.
Surveillance concerns pose a problem of entering a privacy nightmare.