Owners of Embodied's doomed Moxie robot may get a reprieve from the shutdown, thanks to an eleventh-hour open-source attempt to keep the robot running.
Moxie the robot - Image credit: Embodied
Early in December, it was reported that Embodied, the company behind the child-centric Moxie robot, was shutting down, and would be taking the robot with it. Owners of the $800 robot were informed that it would stop working after the cloud servers get shut down in the future.
With Moxie used by parents to help aid the social development of children, including autistic kids, this meant parents had to explain why their children couldn't play with their robotic friend anymore.
It now seems that Moxie may be allowed to continue working, if an effort to make some software changes comes to fruition.
In a post to LinkedIn on Friday spotted by Ars Technica, owners of Moxie are being informed of an effort to work around the cloud server problem. The plan is to release a local server application, "OpenMoxie," which will run on a computer on the home network.
The idea is that, following an over-the-air update for Moxie itself, owners can then run the server app, which Moxie will connect to for processing.
OpenMoxie will be a "community-driven option" that, once released, will handle basic functionality for Moxie. It will be possible for new features to be developed for Moxie, and for changes to be made to how the robot functions, without using Embodied cloud servers at all.
However, there are two obstacles in the way. First, there's an urgent over-the-air update for the robot that owners must install as soon as possible, as it will only be available while the Embodied cloud servers are still available.
To update the over-the-air update, Moxie must be turned on and connected to Wi-Fi. It will take at least an hour for the update to download and install automatically in the background.
The second obstacle is the actual release of the actual OpenMoxie server application itself. The company's notice says it is being worked on, but stops short of saying when or if it will be released.
Embodied intends to "release all necessary code and documentation so that developers or community members can maintain and enhance Moxie independently."
The notice goes to great length to reiterate that there will not be any "guarantees, promises, or warranties" for Moxie after the OTA update is released. All code and documentation is provided "as is" for the community to work with, and that there is not any expectation for Embodied employees to provide technical assistance or further updates.
Following the update and the server software release, it's unlikely that Moxie will be back to a full-feature capacity for quite some time, even with considerable community effort. However, it does at least give hope to families that the robot can continue to be a friend for the foreseeable future.