Keepon is Now on Sale!

For those who've been asking.......YES! The cuddly cute robot Keepon is now on sale! The creators of Keepon - Hideki Kozima in Japan and Marek Michalowski in the U.S. - have started a company - BeatBots LLC - to commercialize the robot. They are working with Japan's Kokoro Company to manufacture a research-level version called Keepon Pro.

Right now, at a base price of $30,000 a bot, Keepon Pro is expected to sell mostly to research institutions for studies in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and to museums. But if you wait a little while, they are "planning to come out with a new version which will use a simpler mechanism and have a cheaper price tag," says Kozima-san, who on Oct. 1 just changed jobs from NICT (where he spent the last 14.5 years) to become a professor at Miyagi University.

For those who are unfamiliar with Keepon, it is a robot initially developed by Prof. Kozima to do research on interaction between robots and children - thus the cuddly features. His observations of autistic children playing with Keepon have led him to think about the quintessence of autism and ways of applying such robots to therapeutic care.

Meanwhile, Marek, who is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, met Prof. Kozima through a former advisor and developed software that made Keepon react to rhythms and music. When he posted a video of a dancing Keepon to YouTube, it became a global sensation. WIRED Magazine produced a promotion video last year with Keepon and the rock band Spoon.

Now Marek is exploring the role of rhythm in human-robot social interaction using Keepon as his thesis platform. Humans nod and display rhythmic motions when communicating with each other, but how about robots? Would robots be able to communicate with people more efficiently if they used rhythmic synchrony?

HRI is a hot topic in the robotics community and some groups use advanced humanoid robots to do research. Keepon, on the other hand, represents a minimalistic approach. Its appearance and behavior are simple yet dynamic and expressive enough to be able to conduct meaningful social research.

AND it's cute - bringing us back to Keepon Pro. Since its YouTube debut, the public has clamored to see more Keepon, so Kozima-san and Marek have been busy traveling around the world to invited events. And people started asking them whether they were ever going to commercialize it. The two won the Robots at Play Prize in Denmark last year, and that prize money went into starting the company.

Keepon Pro is only the first product from BeatBots. Their business plan is to design, develop and market new robots that can be used in research, therapy and entertainment.

(An update on this story here.)

Comments

[bill]

were do I get one??????? I neeeddddd one!!!

[Norri Kageki]

You can contact Marek and/or Kozima-san from here http://beatbots.org/contact/