Only once in a while, something revolutionary happens. We saw that happen with Apple, with the launch of Mac, iPod, iPhone and the iPad. But then, these revolutionary products spin a lot of new innovations around it. We think, one such innovation that’s happening right now, is with the company called Anki.
It’s 2014, and the gap between consumers and the robotics is still huge. Very few companies try to fix it. Anki, was clever enough to realize that bringing robots to the consumers would be much easier, if they smash video games and real-world robots. They did just that with Anki Drive, when they showcased their product during the WWDC Keynote.
The company’s Anki Drive, went on sale on October 23rd for $199 for the starter kit, and we have been impressed with the reviews and the performance of these cars. When everyone thought there’s no opportunity for the developers to play around with these Artificial Intelligence (AI) cars, Anki also released a developer program with the Software Development Kit.
As enthusiasts and developers at Skcript, we have been going through the SDK documentations ever since they released it, and numerous ideas about playing around and developing for Anki Drive has been popping up in our heads. But we were wondering how the data is being crunched in a very short while, and how these cars are so very accurate in doing the calculations. And interestingly, when digging around these areas, we found that Anki uses Amazon AWS (Amazon Web Service) to power these calculations and collect data, and crunch them in no time.
As soon as we learnt some amazing facts such as the number of messages that are being transferred to the servers and back, we were not able to resist ourselves. Let us now share some understanding and interesting things we found about Anki and its workflow.
Anki was founded by three Ph.D. Graduates at Carnegie Mellon University, Boris Sofman, Mark Palatucci and Hanns Tappeiner. The original idea of smashing robotics with video games was born at a Palo Alto café, back in June 2007. The original idea was to put robotics in place where consumers would love to use, and the best way was to tie it up with video games.
About three years after the original idea came out, the company, Anki was incorporated after filing patent for their revolutionary idea, Anki Drive, which was later previewed during the WWDC 2013 Keynote, right after Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook’s talk. During that Keynote, Boris Sofman, clearly defined what Anki is all about:
“We’re taking all of the things we love about video games, and programming them onto physical characters you can touch.”
What is Anki Drive?
“Anki Drive is battle racing for the real world. With advanced Artificial Intelligence, each car thinks for itself and has one goal in mind: victory.”
This is the description that Anki gives for their revolutionary game that brings real-world smart-toy-cars into vide games, and lets the user control the car with their iOS device. The iOS app that controls both the AI cars and the vehicles that the players control. The cars run on the vinyl track that Anki has created, and also, the users can choose to compete with each other, or with the AI car that can control itself. And believe me, the cars are wonderfully brilliant.
These cars have a camera mounted at the bottom, that does all the data gathering that’s required for the cars to move automagically. The data collected from the camera are then passed onto the iOS device, while some data is being processed on the device itself.
Boris Sofman, demoed the Anki Drive during the WWDC Keynote in 2013, and here’s the video from the event:
Anki currently offers the starter kit for just $199, which comes with only two cars. But the company is also giving you an option to buy more cars for $70 each.
In case you are wondering how the calculations happens. Anki has developed an amazingly efficient algorithm that is capable of doing calculations in real-time. Here’s a video that clearly explains how Anki Drive works, and how it calculates the moves automagically with its AI sensors and cameras mounted on the device.
Now you get an idea about how the Anki Drive works, and how well it has been designed to take full advantage of advanced robotics and the iOS 7’s Bluetooth LE technology. But there’s more to this. And I can’t wait to show you how!
How Anki Drive uses AWS?
Processing 8 million messages in the SQS queue, without even losing a single message is something tremendous. And Anki, has pulled it off with ease, with the new architecture they created for themselves using Docker and other available methods on AWS.
During December last year, we, at Skcript were working on a project that mainly relies on transferring messages between different devices. We worked so hard to bring down the message loss whenever we faced heavy load on our servers. But still, our message counts were far less than the 8 million messages that Anki handled during the Christmas period last year.
At the AdvancedAWS Meetup recently at the Anki’s HQ, Ben Whaley detailed the advanced infrastructure that Anki uses to handle the huge amount of messages that are being handled by the servers. He detailed some techniques, to make things really efficient, that opened up our brains. Ben made a clear point that it all depends on the way you structure and configure the service in your AWS box, and nothing more than that.
Things like Docker and resty, are being used at Anki to handle the message queue. Anki has adopted the continuous deployment to push updates and patches to their backbend systems. The picture below, clearly explains the process that is being used at Anki.
If you are not sure about what the continuous deployment is, the post from Quora Engineering blog would give you an idea about the process. The entire presentation by Ben is available here.
What’s next?
Though this is believed to be the next big thing in gaming, we think the potential for such a powerful algorithm and clean workflow is huge! We can see Anki Drive going to places ‘out of this world’. We hope to review the Anki unit sometime soon, and we can’t wait to show you what we do with these devices at Skcript.