References: 2. A History of Screen-Based Robot Faces
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Anki (American company) - Wikipedia - Covers Anki's 2010 founding by Carnegie Mellon graduates, its venture funding rounds totaling over $180 million, the Cozmo and Vector product lines, and the company's April 2019 shutdown and asset sale.
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Cozmo - Wikipedia - Details Cozmo's design, OLED-based "emotion engine" face, 2016 launch, critical reception, and its "Legacy" section covering Vector as its 2018 successor and later revival under Digital Dream Labs.
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Social robot - Wikipedia - Defines the broader category of robots built to interact and communicate with people, with background on the field's history and examples that give context for why Cozmo, Vector, Miko, and Buddy count as social robots.
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Designing Sociable Robots - Cynthia L. Breazeal - MIT Press - A foundational text on building robots that express emotion and read social cues, giving students the design theory behind the screen-as-face approach every robot in this chapter uses.
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The Hardware Startup: Building Your Product, Business, and Brand - Renee DiResta, Brady Forrest, and Ryan Vinyard - O'Reilly Media - Explains how hardware companies raise funding, run crowdfunding campaigns, and make cost trade-offs, directly relevant to Anki's, Miko's, and Buddy's funding and discontinuation stories.
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Consumer Robotics Company Anki Abruptly Shuts Down - IEEE Spectrum - Reports on Anki's April 2019 shutdown after a late-stage financing deal collapsed, illustrating how robot product discontinuation can happen even after major commercial success.
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Anki Vector Robot Teardown - Fictiv - An engineering teardown showing Vector's roughly 40 custom-molded parts and complex manual assembly, giving a concrete, hardware-level view of the cost trade-offs behind a screen-based companion robot.
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Buddy Is A Really, Really, Ridiculously Cute Family Robot - TechCrunch - An early hands-on look at Blue Frog Robotics' Buddy prototype around its 2015 Indiegogo campaign, covering its planned features and the founder's pitch for a full-mobility home companion robot.
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The Owner of Anki's Assets Plans to Relaunch Cozmo and Vector This Year - TechCrunch - Covers Digital Dream Labs' 2021 plan to bring Cozmo and Vector back to store shelves after acquiring Anki's assets, showing that a robot commercial outcome can extend well past a shutdown.
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Miko: Learning Curve - Forbes India - Profiles Emotix founders Sneh Vaswani, Prashant Iyengar, and Chintan Raikar, tracing Miko's design goals, funding rounds, and expansion into schools that helped it outlast Cozmo, Vector, and Buddy.