4/20/2020
There may be hope for Anki’s Cozmo robot fans – Digital Dream Labs has bought the rights to Cozmo, as well as the rights to Anki’s other virtual assets. Digital Dream Labs did not purchase any physical assets or inventory, but they hope to have new Cozmo robots available by Christmas 2020.
Note: You can no longer access www.anki.com since it redirects you to the Digital Dream Labs website, but as of right now https://developer.anki.com/ is still accessible. We recommend you download any material from this site while it’s still available.
Anki’s Shocking News
Anki’s Cozmo robot is an app-driven robot whose cuteness won over the hearts of kids and adults alike. According to the Anki website, over 6.5 million Anki devices have been sold. This figure includes Vector, Anki’s home robot, as well as their Overdrive racing system. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to keep Anki in business. Head over to the Anki website, https://www.anki.com, and you’ll see the following popup message:
It is with a heavy heart to inform you that Anki has ceased product development and we are no longer manufacturing robots. To our partners and customers, thank you for all your support and joining us on this journey to bring robotics and AI out of research labs and into your homes.
We are taking steps to assure that customers will continue to enjoy continued use of our products. In order to provide long term support of our products, Anki has contracted our most senior leaders and hands-on engineers across all the technical areas involved in maintaining the operation and functionality in the existing products and apps. Ongoing operations for existing products typically require little to no active intervention, but we have arranged for any support in the event it does become necessary. Vector is the only product with a notable cloud component, and the contracted team is heavily staffed in that area.
Currently, we have implemented a self-serve Help Center to assist in getting the most out of your product, regretfully there are no agents available, however we are monitoring cloud operations for Anki accounts and Vector.
We plan to solidify and communicate all the details of this plan soon.
Why You Should Keep Your Cozmo Bot Going
We first discussed Cozmo in our Case of the Mysterious Robots post back in November 2018. This post broke down the pros and cons of some of the top robots available for you and your kids. As we stated then, Cozmo was by far our favorite little bot. Cozmo may come in a small package, but like Anki said on their website – ‘He’s big in personality’. Personality alone didn’t put Cozmo on the top of our list though. The continual stream of new games and activities developed by Anki’s developers over the last few years weren’t enough to put Cozmo on top either. Those features are impressive, but it was Cozmo’s programmable nature that made him our favorite bot. Anki made it possible for your kids to develop their programming skills one level at a time while having fun with Cozmo. Your kids may not be ready for all of Cozmo’s programming capabilities, but keeping Cozmo working until they are is well worth the effort.
Block Style Programming
Anki’s Code Lab Sandbox was designed for younger kids. These beginner level code blocks snap together to make Cozmo perform fun, basic activities.
Scratch
Anki’s Code Lab Constructor was designed for kids ready to move up to an intermediate level of programming. This Scratch programming environment allows your kids to program more complex projects.
Python
Anki’s Python SDK was designed for the more advanced programmer. If your kids have mastered programming Cozmo with Scratch, Python can help them take their skills to the next level.
How to Keep Anki’s Cozmo Robot Working
As soon as we heard that Anki had to shut down we kicked into survival mode. If you are just hearing the bad news, we hope the following tips will help you out:
Prepare Additional Devices
Our first thought after hearing about Anki’s shutdown was backward compatibility. How long will the dedicated Anki developers be able to keep the Cozmo app up to date? How long will Cozmo continue to work with future iOS and Android software updates? We have no idea what to expect, so we charged our old devices, updated the software as much as possible, and now have the Cozmo app working on as many devices as possible.
Why did we want Cozmo working on multiple devices? We will now test Cozmo with each new software update for both iOS and Android. When the day comes that Cozmo isn’t compatible with an update, we will stop updating our older devices and use them as dedicated controllers. We plan on going to great lengths to keep Cozmo up and running for as long as possible.
Download the Python SDK and All Relevant Documentation
We don’t know how long Anki’s website will be accessible, so we’ve downloaded what we can now in case the site goes down in the future. Hopefully, this will ensure access to the Python SDK each time we buy a new computer too.
You can access these downloads from the Documentation tab on the Anki developer’s site: https://developer.anki.com/index.html. We recommend you get the Python SDK environment up and running now while Cozmo is still everyone’s favorite bot. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to find help with any installation problems you may run into.
Periodically Check for Status Updates on Cozmo’s Future
We plan on periodically checking for any new information on Cozmo’s future and will share any news that we hear.