Competition for AIBO: Robo Cat

bruce76 writes, "A Japanese company called Toshihiro Tashima is slated to introduce a robotic cat similar (in concept) to the Sony Aibo. This robotic cat is called Tama," They put fur on it, but the most interesting part is that they claim it can recognize its own name. That's a improvement over Aibo who isn't deaf, but sound doesn't do too much for him.

Comments

Cats.

[Signal 11]

Anyone ever play Catz or petz? If so, you know what I'm thinking of: I want to train my legion of robotic pets to fear me. I want psychotic pets. I want my neighbors to wonder why there's 30 glowing eyes on my roof all howling at the moon in a tin-can like voice. I want them to BEG for their batteries. I want them to develop a strong hatred for the Energizer Bunny, Barney, and Teletubbies. They are to be lasered on sight.

For their service, I will provide robotic modifications - ultraviolet lasers with a 1.5M volt output (ultraviolet lasers leave the air the laser fired through ionized providing a path for electrons to follow. Think: tesla coil), evil glowing eyes, 180 db pizo-electric buzzers from hell and IR / RF outputs to mess with electronics. These will be the pets from hell

I like that.. the perfect compliment to a BOFH's LART - 30 evil robotic cats. "Awww, aren't they cute - look at those 6" long metal claws.... oh.. wait..." *electronic growling* RUN FOOL RUN!!!!!

Buwhahahaahahahaha!

This is no great technical feat.

[Mr. Neutron]

Let's see... robotic cat.... needs to be able to:

-Sit comatose for hours on end
-Meow incessantly for no reason whatsoever
-Mindlessly scratch all furniture it sees to shreads
-Ignore everything that people say to it

The technology to accomplish this has existed for decades.

:-)

--

I wrote the API for it

[DonkPunch]

I'm not really supposed to disclose this, but....

There is a software API for this thing. I wrote a large part of it. I basically modeled it on my own cat.

It supports the following calls:

sleep() /* May be called anytime, anywhere */

eat()

go_potty() /* Works best when passed a proper LITTERBOX struct */

shred() /* If no arg, defaults to last FURNITURE struct */

pounce() /* May be called with claws=true/false and teeth=true/false */

sleep_more() /* Added 11/15/99. More realism. */

Pretty much covers it, I think.