GetRobo

Walking iPhone Robot

Kazu Terasaki, a Japanese software engineer working in the Silicon Valley area, turned his iPhone into a robot. He showed it off for the first time at a BBQ party held here.

Kazu is a "moonlight inventor" and his inventions that have been commercialized in the past include ThumbType (a tiny keyboard that you can paste on your PDA) and Weird7 (a biped robot kit).

He was also involved in a product called PuchiRobo which is another robot kit that enables you to turn anything from a beer can to a tissue box into a walking robot. That technique is used in making his iPhone walk too. Right now you need a PC to move the robot, but in the future he'd like to come up with a chip too, so that you can just paste everything on your beer and it will come walking to you. The cute moving eye balls are also an application he created for the iPhone.

Kazu's expertise and motto is "to surprise people by creating new stuff using just ordinary technhology." His ideas and perspective have brought in a breath of fresh air to the robotics community in Japan where engineers generally want to use the most advanced and expensive techonologies.

Here is another video of the walking iPhone made by Kazu himself (although it's not quite my taste).

Sony's new music player Rolly

Sony announced it's new music player Rolly. It will hit the market in Japan on Sept. 29. The concept is similar to  miuro, but Rolly is smaller. And whereas miuro is autonomous and more "robotic" - it can follow you around from room to room and prevent itself from falling off from tables etc. - what Rolly basically does is show some cool movements that match the music.

According to an article on ITpro, Rolly was developed by some of the people that used to work on the AIBO at Sony. Although when they started talking about developing a new music player utilizing some AIBO technologies, they didn't know that AIBO was going to be discontinued. They started working on it seriously about a year and a half ago teaming up with the audio group.

The goal was to create a music player that would surprise people because of the sound quality coming out from something that is so small. The team put a lot of effort in figuring out the best balance between sound and motion - a bigger speaker meant better sound but less space for motors which were also important for interesting movements. AIBO's technology was utilized in creating quick but smooth and quiet movements so that they don't interfere with the music. The developers think that although Rolly is not a pet like AIBO, people will feel empathy for the player due to its movements.

Sony doesn't plan on doing big advertising on TV for this new product. The company is planning on using its blog and other word of mouth marketing strategies to sell Rolly.

According to Sony's press release, Rolly weighs 300g, battery life is about 4 hours with sound and motion, 3.5 hours when using Bluetooth, comes with 1GB flash memory. Price is expected to be around 40,000 yen ($350).

More photos and videos on ROBOT WATCH. You can see how you can control the volume and select songs by turning the wheels.

   

 

Keepon at WIRED NextFest

The yellow snowman robot Keepon will be on stage with Spoon at the WIRED NextFest concert and WIRED has made a great video. The "mad scientist" in the video is Hideki Kozima - the man that developed the robot - himself. The cute creation was born out of a cooperation between Kozima-san and Marek Michalowski who programmed Keepon to dance.  More on the robot on this website, Robots Dreams and Loving the Machine.

Robo Catcher on trial

I wrote about the Robo Catcher in a previous post but Souichi Nagasato, president of MechaTrax, which builds the robots, alerted me that the new game machines are now on trial at 3 locations in Japan. Check out this video. The Robo Catcher will make it's formal debut sometime this winter, according to Nagasato-san.

 

Creating Contents for the Future

I met Tomoaki Kasuga, founder and CEO of Speecys Corp., and he says that he is hoping to start developing applications and contents in the U.S. for their humanoid robot  MI・RAI-RT. (MIRAI means the FUTURE in Japanese.) Kasuga-san, who used to work on the AIBO at Sony before starting his company, wants MI・RAI to always be connected to the network and become a "new medium." Whereas the TV uses a screen to transmit information, the robot will use it's hands and legs. He's hoping to get new ideas for content by having developers not just in Japan but in the U.S. as well.

Robotic Music Player

ZMP Inc. says that it has started shipping within Japan its robotic music player miuro. The company announced the iPod dockable music player last summer and it has gotten a lot of press in Japan since then. Using robotic technology, miuro can follow you around the house. According to a blog written by ZMP's CEO, the company wants to seriously start marketing it in the U.S. and Europe soon.

Robo Catcher

Robotics startup MechaTrax wants to put its small humanoid robots into the arcade machines. In Japan, an arcade game called UFO Catcher is very popular. Whereas with UFO Catcher you try to pick up a prize - such as a stuffed animal - with a crane, you will manipulate a robot with the proposed new Robo Catcher. Here is a link to a video that shows how it works. Quite a number of Japanese startups have come out with humanoid robots in the past few years and most are still trying to figure out how to make money with them. MechaTrax is betting on the arcade business.