Keeker could be the first proper robot to grace homes with myriad uses. It's basically a little Star Wars style R2D2 for the real world, minus the weapons.
Keeker is primarily a moving projector with surround sound. That means you can send it anywhere in the house on its self-driving robo-wheels, or the garden, and enjoy big screen entertainment wirelessly.
It also has sensor including mic and camera meaning it can act as a security bot alerting you to intruders. Or you can take control of it remotely and zip about the house to see if everything is ok. It'll even measure the home temperature and outside conditions. The uses could go on and on.
Keeker can project a 1080p, 40-inch screen from 2 feet away, offers 360-degree sound with six 25W speakers, and has sensors for ultrasound, infrared, light, air quality, temperature, cliff (to stop it falling off an edge) and humidity. It comes with 1 terabyte of storage to keep movies and photos locally if you want. Battery life has not been mentioned but with a recharge bay it'll likely rejoice when it gets the chance much like a robot vacuum.
But what we like about this current Kickstarter project is the potential for the future. This little bot could run your home computer, it could have vacuum attachments to clean, it could hold a tray to move things about the home – the list goes on. Also the fact Keeker runs Android apps suggest it could have even more potential for the future. Imagine setting Keeker to come into your room and display fullscreen when breaking news appears on your Guardian app, for example. Or it comes to you when receiving a call over Skype. Perhaps integrate home heating controls too.
Keeker smashed its Kickstarter goal with over $250,000 funding so far. But that doesn't translate to a lot of units necessarily as each one, for Kickstarter earlybirds, is still a whopping $1,990.