Scout
The Galaxy's Smartest Interactive Learning Companion

Scout is a robot, a learning companion, and a best friend - designed specifically for kids. Scout is a super-smart and inquisitive galactic explorer, that is excited about playing games, creating stories, going on adventures – and of course answering questions – without ever getting tired.

At the start of the project, Elemental Path approached Tomorrow Lab with a wishlist of new product features. The goal was to leverage the pre-existing platform behind the Cognisaur, called The Friendgine - a powerful and patent pending AI platform. The Friendgine offers over 10 million interactions through voice interaction, utilizing proprietary scripting language and offering on-the-fly adaptable dialog trees, answers pulled from knowledge bases, and fun interactions. The content that Scout searches when a question is asked is pulled from a number of internal and sometimes external sources (like the weather for example), all that have been vetted for optimum safety and child friendliness.

01 — Product Development & Feature Strategy

Tomorrow Lab’s process first started with character development. In this process, we imagined not only the character possibilities but also the worlds they live in; from fantasy creatures in a surreal world, to animals in a real-life jungle, to astronaut explorers in an unknown outer space. After narrowing down the options, and settling on the astronaut character, we conducted several rounds of detailed character form refinement, including invention of technical features on the product itself: belly and mustache touch sensors, ambient light sensors, accelerometers, ring LEDs, and LEDs in the visor creating ’dead face’ display.

02 —Mechanical & Electrical Engineering

Now for the hard work: with the character and technical features defined, Tomorrow Lab lead the iterative Electrical and Mechanical Design and Engineering to develop a Product Architecture capable of housing all the necessary components. Through iterative rounds of fabrication, we developed the PCBs and plastic housings necessary to create a set of testable prototypes for user evaluation.