E-commerce firm Amazon’s first home robot looks far too cute to become anything like the homicidal robots we tend to see in sci-fi films that want to hurt us. Astro is about the size of a small dog or a vacuum cleaner, comes equipped with a screen that rotates, can wheel around a house on its own and uses data it picks up from its camera to avoid bumping into things. With the introduction of this device, Amazon has set its sights on cornering the household robot market. “In five to 10 years, we believe that every household will have at least one robot that will become a fundamental part of their daily life,” Amazon’s head of devices David Limp said on September 28 as he unveiled the robot. Astro can be used for communication and as a mobile security system to patrol a home on its own. It can also, for example, follow and monitor elderly family members as they move through a house. Limp tested Astro at home for about a year, using it to check if his dogs were jumping on the sofa when no one was at home. The camera can be raised up to a height of a metre (3ft 3 inches) so it can peer over objects. The company plans to initially make Astro available to selected users for around US$1,000. Other companies are, too, working on creating their own household robots, with tools such as a gripper that could be used to handle menial tasks. Amazon also wants to turn its Echo speakers into a sort of digital noticeboard and control centre for use in a connected (or smart) home by introducing a new, flat-screen model. The new Echo Show has a 15-inch display and can be hung on a wall – like a photo frame. The device can optionally, thanks to its inbuilt camera, recognise individuals in a household and display information tailored to them, such as an appointment calendar. Amazon also plans to introduce a smart thermostat for air conditioners that will cost US$60, as well as a device called Amazon Glow that will allow children to play and interact with people via a video-calling function. It will have a camera and screen, and be able to project interactive games onto a tabletop surface for both users to play together. Amazon was, thanks to Alexa ( the virtual assistant technology developed by the e-commerce giant and used in the company’s Echo speakers ), one of the first companies in the world to employ the use of voice assistants in a smart home. The company’s goal is to create a variety of devices that can work together to help support all the members of a household in their various tasks. As a new building block for this, Amazon has also introduced the possibility of teaching Alexa to recognise particular sounds that trigger a particular action. For example, it can be made to send someone a message when it hears the beeping sound a refrigerator makes when it is left open for too long. Alexa already sends alerts out for sounds like breaking glass.