Although it’s old news by this point, I had to talk about the return of the Vector robot. Ok, “return” is still a little premature, but ongoing support has happened.

A company called Digital Dream Labs purchased all of the rights to Vector (and, I believe, the rest of Anki’s products) and ran a Kickstarter to keep the little guy alive.

I backed this of course, because robots.

While they have yet to produce the final products that may of us paid for (which is software they are working on), they are moving things formward with minor updates and od course the important task of keeping his servers up.

What’s promised is a way for those of us who want to develop for Vector to do two main things. One is redirect him to a new server, including a self-hosted server. This is the safety net should DDL someday cease to exist.

The second is full access to programming Vector, not just being able to control him via an external Python program. This is the one I’m really excited about. I like robots that can access the network and leverage it to do things, but the ability to add intrinsic behaviors is really important.

So thanks to DDL for rescuing Vector, and fingers crossed that they find the success they deserve!