LG and Samsung have really taken advantage of the calm before the CES storm by teasing out their product announcements, one by one. LG’s certainly ahead in terms of sheer strangeness here, having already announced a floating speaker and a wearable speaker collar.
The Seoul-based electronics giant will also apparently be showing off a bunch of robots at the show. It’s not the company’s first robotic rodeo, of course, having already released some robotic vacuum cleaners and, at the very least, shown off some…interesting takes on the space, including the Rolling Bot that debuted at MWC last year (below).
A trio of “non-cleaning” robots teased by the company, include what sounds like a lawn mowing model, a commercial model designed to offer up travel info to humans at airports and hotels and the Hub Robot – which, from the sound of things, is a bit like a mobile Amazon Echo.
There’s very little to work with at the moment, but the company is calling the “Hub Robot” (their quotes, mind) “smart home gateway and a personal assistant for consumers.” All of the above robots will be equipped with some form of AI, according to the company, but it’s hard to say how far that will extend before Alexa-style question answering and home automation.
Keep in mind that the company announced the SmartThinQ Hub (pictured at top), an Echo-style speaker that later incorporated Alexa functionality. If I had to guess, I’d say the Hub is will look similar to the company’s HOM-BOT, while trading in cleaning for personal assisting.
Whatever the case, we’ll find out in a matter of days.
