CES 2020: Samsung Unveiled Its Ball-Shaped Housekeeper Robot

During CES 2020 in Las Vegas, Samsung just unveiled a new housekeeper robot called Samsung Ballie with built-in artificial intelligence to help people with household chores. This ball-shaped robot resembles the BB-8 robot in the famous Star Wars movies. Ballie is compact, a bit bigger than a tennis ball.

In a demo video that Samsung showed on the stage of CES 2020, people can see Ballie taking the role of a “housekeeper” inside a smart apartment, taking care of all smart appliances when the house owner isn’t there. A representative of Samsung announced that Ballie will take up an important role when smart houses become more mainstream in the future.

For example, the little housekeeper can control the smart curtain system to open in the morning or turn on the TV for your pet when you aren’t at home. When it detects that the floor is dirty, it will automatically activate its cleaning mode and work like those robotic vacuums available on the market. Noticeably, Samsung also equips Ballie with a Fall Detection feature which can also be found in Apple Watches. If it detects a person falling, it will call for help.

According to Samsung, Ballie is designed to understand and assist house owners in their daily lives. It can also recognize and follow its owner, thanks to the built-in camera and sensor. Users can also control it with their voices.

An interesting thing about Samsung Ballie is that its design and features remind us of a housekeeper robot from LG called The Rolling Bot. LG unveiled this robot back in 2016. The Rolling Bot also has the shape of a ball and is designed to assist homeowners with their chores.

At the moment, Samsung has revealed any information about Ballie’s pricing and release date. Samsung’s representative confirmed that the robot showcased at CES 2020 is only a prototype designed for trial. Sam Mobile reported that Samsung engineers will need more time to finish improve and complete this robot before it is commercialized. If Ballie is welcomed on the market, Samsung might even release the Ballie robot 2.0 in the future.

In this digital age, there will be no time until our world is filled with robots. It might be soon that we can robots with superhuman abilities and human emotions like Vir in the movie Vir the robot boy. If you are interested in how to make robots, check out this article.