Now playing: Watch this: Meet Cozmo, the AI robot with emotions

Cozmo is an AI robot that learns about you over time. Powered by a so-called emotion engine, Cozmo recognizes faces and responds to external stimuli in order to develop its personality.

The palm-sized robot can play games and has facial recognition -- but that's just the start. Developed by Anki, the company behind the Overdrive racing cars, Cozmo will soon get even more powerful.

Anki will have a beta software development kit for Cozmo available to makers and hobbyists at its launch in October 2016, the company said Monday. The SDK will enable you to program Cozmo to perform complex tasks with just a few lines of code.

Further down the track, educators and third-party developers will be able to get their hands on the kit.

At a demo in San Francisco on Friday, Anki co-founder Hanns Tappeiner showed CNET how one line of code could make Cozmo navigate around objects to pick up a block. Behind the scenes, that one function was calling up hundreds of other lines of code that were using obstacle detection and path mapping in order to get Cozmo to complete the task.

Developers and makers will be able to use the SDK to get Cozmo to perform an entire range of complex robotic tasks -- like tracking faces in 3D space or navigating with path planning -- without needing any background or knowledge of robotics or machine learning.