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Segway’s Loomo bot drives like a hoverboard and follows like a puppy

Segway’s Loomo bot drives like a hoverboard and follows like a puppy

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Segway-Ninebot

Segway-Ninebot, which owns Segway Robotics, first showed off its Segway Advanced Personal Robot back in 2016, and the product has slowly evolved since then. The Lego-style arms are gone, the bot is now known as Loomo, and there’s a version for developers that’s already shipping. Now the consumer version of Loomo is about ready to ship (“in the weeks following CES”), and it still sounds fun after two years of incubation — although price is still a big question mark.

The main premise of the Loomo is that you can ride it like a hoverboard, but once you hop off, the head swivels around and becomes a face. The bot can follow you around autonomously, take pictures on demand, work as a surveillance robot, and “[make] everyone laugh with its wit and personality.” One potential application is that you could ride Loomo to the grocery store, then have Loomo carry your groceries home for you — as demonstrated in this short video:

Loomo runs Android, and third-party developers are supposed to be able to add new functionality. There’s also an enterprise version in the work, called Loomo Go, which can pull a storage wagon behind it for deliveries.

Despite its appearance, Loomo doesn’t seem to have articulated arms, or a mouth, or a digestive system, so I don’t know why it’s obsessed with apples: