IIT-Bombay graduates launch India's first advanced personal robot for kids

Alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay — Vaswani, Prashant V Iyengar and Chintan S Raikar — launch what they claim to be India’s first advanced personal robot for children called ‘Miko 2’. The robot will help parents in early education, development of children by engaging in ‘playful learning’.

WiFi-operated robot, costing Rs 24,999, will be available from December 15, 2018. “The robot can initiate and hold long conversations with kids. It can impart academic and general knowledge among children. It is powered by a proprietary emotional intelligence engine developed by emotix. This enables the robot to identify and remember the child’s moods and adapt to it,” said co-founder and CEO Sneh Rajkumar Vaswani.

The Miko 2 encompasses a major makeover to its maiden product, Miko launched last year, and the new series of robots can see, hear, sense, express, talk, recognize faces, remember names, sense moods, initiate conversation, and learn form its own environment to develop a bond with the child.

The robot comes with preloaded games, riddles, fun facts, rhymes, music, dance etc and can be loaded with new content. It already knows ICSE curriculum, Storywalker and Amar Chitra Katha stories. It also allows parents to conduct a video calling on ‘wheels’ through Miko from anywhere in the world, and a parental dashboard to help them track and guide the child’s interaction with the robot.