_while I was watching my saturday morning youtube I stumbled across “cutewithchris”. It´s an hillarious show with pet pictures and some deep, self ironic comedy smattering about almost everything. (chris´comparision of canada and america is one nice example) But this only on a sidenote. What really got my attention was his show about the Robo_cat. Watch it here:
So, I was wondering if there´s AIBO dog and a robo cat, there must be some more robotic pet stuff…
_Joe Alterio, the guy who created the robotic revolution posters pointed me out to his new project:
it´s his new charitable project in which EVERYONE can own a personal robot. That´s right, you´ll send him 50bucks and three keywords you´d like to have your robot jugglin with and joe or some of the contributin artist(alongside Matt Haley of DC comics.. you know his OMACs) will create an artwork with YOUR bot(monsters are available also)! And the best part of it, your money will be donated for a good cause. So, you´ll get your monster or robot and some other guys in need get your money. Everybody´s happy, everybody wins. So if you want to get some of these:
check out this:
_having said this, now to my own experiences with the AIBO dog. I was able to get one of the museum guards to let the puppets dance for me. He was quite in love with the robots and especially AIBO the cute little robodog. The dog can recognize cards holding in front of its face(the museum beeing too noisy and huge to let him distinguish voice commands). And guess what: the guard WANTED TO MAKE IT DANCE!!!!!!-again!!! robot dancing!!!! well, however, the poor dog was overwhelmed and we had to wait quite a long time until we finally saw a little bit dancin.. it´s quite slow in capacity and working with orders. In addition to that I found out about his sensors on the back(it recognize if you stroke it and reacts in an amused way) and in the head(same over here). I guess it´s actually not important if you really stroke it, just touch it, but you automatically do the stroking although it feels a little bit awkward on hard plastic. But the reactions of the bot are so “cute”, that you´re not paying too much attention to the “hard feelings”. Interesting to me was a little kid being attracted by AIBO´s action and the adults crying out: “how cute!” and “he likes you!”. Although the bot was much slower than a real deal dog(some of them can dance, too;)
_of course I heard and read a lot about this robot during my researches, but before I wanted to write about it I felt the urge to get my own hands on one. Laste weekend I´ve been finally able to get hold of a sony AIBO dog at the robot exhibition in the “Museum für Kommunikation in Berlin”.
AIBO (Artificial Intelligence roBOt, homonymous with “partner” in Japanese) is a robotic dog developed by the Sony corporation in 1999, it had several predecessors and originally started off as a robotic study project and got later on developed for mass market(well, kind off, since the retail price is around 1500$-making it not exactly a toy for everyone). It is able to walk, “see” its environment via camera, film and photograph, recognize spoken commands and can play tunes or even speak itself. They are considered to be autonomous robots, since they are able to learn and mature based on external stimuli from their owner or environment, or from other AIBOs. It can be run with AIBOware(which you can download on it´s pink memory stick), a software especially programmed from sony. Distinguishing the Life AIBOware, in which you can “raise” your dog from puppet to fully grown and the Explorer AIBOware, where the doy is fully grown and obeys around 100 voice commands.Apart from the firmwares, there is a huge hacker community out there who reprogramm the AIBO dog at their own needs and pleasure. After an attempt of Sony to shut this hacker community down, the company recived protest letters of outraged AIBO owners and eventually released free programmer´s kits which are also used and further developed by universities. Thus the AIBO has been seen as an inexpensive platform for artificial intelligence research, because it integrates a computer, vision system, and articulators in a package vastly cheaper than conventional research robots.
On January 26, 2006 Sony announced that it would discontinue AIBO and several other products as of March, 2006. This is mainly due to cost-cutting and reorganization effort of the company.
(source: wikipedia.org + support.sony-europe.com/aibo/ + http://news.com.com/ )
_finally I made it to the robot exhibition of the “Museum für kommunikation Berlin”. It´s a rather small but nonetheless very interesting temporary exhibition that gives a quick overview about robots in media and real life. Some short history and classic stuff and some rather new, up to date stuff.
Of special interest for me were the reactions of the visitors to the actual real working robots in the foyer and inside the exhibition. I was very anxious how several robots in the real world and in a comparable small area would interact with humans and vice versa. The huge foyer of the neo-classic-museum-building is animated with three robots. One is greeting the visitors when they step in front of it. Another one is rather chasing the visitors, while the third one is chasing a pink ball. The latter is of great interest for children and they love to stay and experiment with the ball and robot. How does it react and how can I change it´s behaviour or how can I fool it or make it angry? One reason is the constant nonsense chattering of the robot, a bit like R2D2, which is also a great sympathy guy. (unfortunately my camera was running low on battery and eventually decided to went down halfway through the day–so no children and bots–was biting my a** whole day long..)
When you enter the part of the robot-exhibition you have to be aware of Aibo, the robot dog, another at least 5ft tall moving robotic robot guide, a robot vacuum cleaner which is bustling around between the visitor´s legs and of course of an Omnibot driving senselessly around corners.
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While watching these guys in real action you wonder how people can be so afraid of robots and them taking over. These guys are totally helpless and in desperate need of help from humans. For example there is one guard who´s only responsibility is to watch that the pink ball of the yellow robot won´t roll down some stairs or get stuck in a corner, leaving the robot helplessly behind or stumbling down the stairs and break in thousand parts.
Another nice detail are these emergency stop buttons on every bot(in case they should turn wild and senseless and try to take over the planet).
