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Zumi is a small robot car equipped with the most real machine vision, on its wheels will bring you into the world of artificial intelligence and unmanned vehicles. After all, she received the award for the best innovation at CES 2019 in the Robotics and Drones category.

What you may not realize is that when you use Amazon Alexa or Google Maps or play mobile games, you are interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) in one way or another. Like coding, learning how AI works will soon become the essential knowledge of tomorrow for anyone involved in the IT world. And Zumi is designed to help turn what is usually difficult into something accessible.

Zumi is the first learning kit to introduce you to the concept of artificial intelligence and self-driving technology in a fun way. The set contains step-by-step guides with which you can teach the car to navigate a miniature map in less than an hour. Moreover, the longer the machine will learn, the smarter it will become.

What can you teach Zumi?

You can program the Zumi to calculate the best route to your destination.

You can teach Zumi to identify objects ahead and make decisions accordingly.

You can train Zumi to recognize gestures and follow your instructions.

You can teach Zumi to recognize family members and friends.

While playing with Zumi, you can learn the following:

Key Features of Zumi

Industry Relevance

Zumi is equipped with standard tools used by engineers who teach real cars to drive automatically, such as TensorFlow and Open CV. TensorFlow is an open source software library designed to program data flow across a range of tasks. OpenCV is a programming function library mainly designed for real-time computer vision. Both are common tools used in self-driving vehicles.

Suitable for beginners and advanced coders

Getting started with Zumi is very easy. Beginners can use the web-based development environment where Zumi is programmed with blocks and Python. All you need is a standard browser. It does not require special installation and configuration.

More experienced programmers can write TensorFlow and Keras code to create their own experiments and design their own neural networks to train Zumi to classify objects and recognize gestures.

Availability

Even if you don’t have any knowledge of robotics, you can still interact with Zumi. Her expressions and behavior are charming. You can play with it for hours without even opening your laptop.

Interactive walkthroughs

Teachers and students do not need prior training to follow the interactive instructions. Anyone with no programming experience can program using blocks.

Technical details

Raspberry Pi Zero platform, gyroscope, accelerometer, 2 DC motors, camera, buzzer, 128×64 OLED screen, 6 IR sensors, 60 minutes battery.

You can pre-order the Zumi car kit on Kickstarter. The set will cost you $139, not including shipping.