Slashdot Mirror
New AIBO Demo'd
RalfM writes: "The
new AIBO has been
demo'd,
and with this version you can watch live footage from
it's cameras via radio link, radio control it, give it
booster packs, and a whole swag of other goodies." I still dig on AIBO, but until it is smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low, it's hard to consider AIBO ready for prime time.
it's part of Carnivore isn't it ?
spiny.
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
All I can say is that their choice of location for the "PC Card Slot" is rather amusing. (Or disgusting, depending on your sense of humor levels....)
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
AIBO?
Isn't that the non-hackable Sony robot toy?
Move along, nothing to see here.
Error:
The story does mention the video feed, but what about sound? With a good hack and a high speed net access , I could actually make sure the kids (and the wife) are behaving while I am at work. And I could roam the house and the yard! I think I'll have to install a pet door?
Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
We want to fill cats with electronics and make electronics more like dogs.
Lets not ignore the advances made in the new AIBO design:
o New leg-humping algorithm for extra comedy
o Now licks balls!
o Spent batteries now drop out of the AIBO's ass.
o New code revision allows the AIBO to shove his nose the crotch of anyone who comes over to visit.
o Will no longer try to assert its dominance over the vaccum cleaner.
o No longer attacks small children
Bowie J. Poag
uh, guys? remember Sony Uses DMCA To Shut Down Aibo Hack Site?
just checked, site's still down. Move along folks.
These items sound exotic, and well, I don't think any one can make them on their own. You can however get one fully assembled. I'm not in a particularly advanced area of the US, but I saw them at the local Mall! I know that there is a specialized dealership called a "Pound" that will sell them refurbished at a great discount.
--Josh
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
heh, sounds like a great way to get back at that pesky neighbor who's cat is always making all that damned racket at night...
It's simple, really. Just follow these easy steps:
- Convince all neighbors to buy AIBO pets once they can do this.
- Dissect AIBO home station, extracting components that do RF communication with pets.
- Mount said components on neighbor's cat.
- Watch in glee as AIBO pets attempt to plug into "recharging station".
- Repeat as necessary with offending cats, employ shotgun technique if ineffective after several days.
My cats live indoorsHe doesn't want one until it is "..smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low..."
:) heheh
OK then mate. Take a trip down to the local electronics store to pick up some optical range sensors (or even a mini-GPS unit for those long distance walks!), maybe a couple of minor burns while soldering and several K's of asm and you're there!
--RupertJ
Must...fight...urge....
Must...resist...flameing....
Noooooo!
New AIBO Demo'd
I find it incredible how the slashdot editorship
As other posters have pointed out, Sony is in legal squabbles with Aibo hacking sites. A POV that paints a rather disturbing (if one can use such a word in the context of a robot pet dog) picture of Sony's tactics can be found here. After reading the above, I'd like to urge people to sign a petition to send a message to Sony so people could customize their Aibos. (And signing the petition also helps Red Cross, which actually is something that matters.)
Universities already customize their Aibo software to participate in Robot Cup, and I don't see why individual users shouldn't be allowed to do the same. Sony will probably use the same prohibitive pricing as it currently uses with all Aibo software, but it would be a start.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
I still dig on AIBO, but until it is smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low, it's hard to consider AIBO ready for prime time.
First off, get off your duff and decide to build your robot "pet", instead of buying one. While you may or may not have the skills needed, they can be learned and developed. After you have built your robot "pet", and actually see it working - you will know true joy at seeing something you built actually doing things - perhaps even things that make it seem "pet-like".
But where to start?
You could start with familiar books on the shelf at a local Bookstar or Amazon, such as The Robot Builder's Bonanza: 99 Inexpensive Robotics Projects by Gordon McComb (ISBN 0-07-136296-7). However, while I strongly reccommend this book, it focuses more on the mechanical side of things (which _is_ important), but not the software/logic side, which for behavioral systems, will be very important (otherwise it just becomes a programmed or r/c car with a "robot" look). So what should one do?
If you want to build a real robotic pet, here are the books you should have in your library of robotic books (among others, of course):
The David L. Heiserman "Series":
Build Your Own Working Robot (Hardbound: ISBN 0-8306-6841-1 - Softbound: ISBN 0-8306-5841-6), TAB Book 841
How to Build Your Own Self-Programming Robot (Hardbound: ISBN 0-8306-9760-8 - Softbound: ISBN 0-8306-1241-6), TAB Book 1241
Robot Intelligence (with experiments) (Hardbound: ISBN 0-8306-9685-7 - Softbound: ISBN 0-8306-1191-6), TAB Book 1191
Though looong out of print, these three volumes are essential, and should be read in the order given, as they build upon one another. The final book in the series picks up where the prior one left off, but goes in the direction of software based "virtual" robots - an early form of virtual artificial life, if you will. However, it is clearly seen that the author intended the reader to apply these programs toward the robot designed and built in the prior book - and thus take them from the virtual to the "real".
Another book worth exploring is called "How to Build Your Own Working Robot Pet" by Frank DaCosta (TAB Book 1141 - sorry, no ISBN, my copy is shipping currently) - also long out of print. From what I remember in the edition I read, it details how to build a small robot with very definite pet-like qualities (whereas Heiserman focused on what he termed "Evolutionary Adaptive Machine Intelligence" or EAMI for short). I am not sure if there was any contact between Heiserman and DaCosta, but both of their books, and a host of others (notably ones by Edward L. Safford) were published around the same time frame by TAB Books. All of the devices described by DaCosta and Heiserman had the capability (depending on your skills) of auto-recharging themselves when their batteries got low (indeed, Heiserman believed such capability was a paramount thing for an autonomous system, and went into great detail on the design of the system and the "coding" and logic for it).
What is most amazing about all of these authors was the time when they were doing this, which was the late 1970's through early 1980's. Such robotic experimentation peaked at around the mid-1980's, then for unknown reasons, went underground. Hobby robotics is now starting to pick up again with a new generation, but the newcomers seem to have lost the "history" behind their experimentations.
These old hobby robot experiments still have great value for experimentors today. Read the books I have outlined above, and apply the principles (I would not suggest anyone to apply the exact methods used in building the original robots - as it just wouldn't be cost effective anymore - both of the first two Heiserman books effectively detailed building small computer systems, the first nearly entirely logic based, with a very Brooks-like subsumptive architecture, long before Brooks - and the second a true 8-bit computer system, using Intel's 8085 CPU!). However, these principles could easily be applied to a BASIC Stamp, or to nearly any other microcontroller - or you could go a step further and use an on-board laptop motherboard or similar.
These are the books I would recommend - apply the "old-school" knowledge of Heiserman, DaCosta, and if you want, Safford - and meld it with a little of Brooks and McComb - imagine the possibilities!
Finally, while you are at it - think of this for me:
Note these older TAB Books - how well laid out they were, how clear the diagrams and details were, the way everything is described, as well as the graphic art. Then take another look at today's so-called "technical" books: hardly will you find an equivalent. Even a recent look between McComb's first and second edition of his "Robot Builder's Bonanza" (I have both) will show you what has occurred - a true loss in quality (the first edition was published by TAB Books, the second by McGrawHill, under some "TAB Electronics" name).
I also want you to think and wonder about where these early robots, and their builders, went - were they relegated to a scrap yard (the robots, not the builders)? Do their builders still own them? Are they in a museum some where?
I seriously wonder about these things - I have a ton of old robot books from the early 1970's to the mid-1980's describing these robots, and there is hardly any information about where they ended up at! History lost! Both hobbiest and commercial ventures seem gone to history (I tend to wonder, on the commercial end, what happened to the Mosher/GE Hardiman "suit", as well as Odetics, Inc's ODEX-1?). Tod Lofburow's (sp?) KIM-1 based triangular hobby robot (which he described in another TAB book, if you want to look it up). I remember in another book a fascinating picture of a six-foot tall humanoid appearing robot named C.H.A.R.L.I.E., who was named after the builder, but the acronym stood for something, which wasn't detailed in the book, as the book was less of a technical book, and more of a "coffee table"-type book - where did this robot end up at? Are all of these devices collecting dust? Will they end up on Ebay?
Please - if anyone has ANY answers, I would most appreciate them...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Real pets can be trained to find the automatic food and water dishes. Then you only have to put out food every other day.
On the other hand feeding is an important part of the pet/owner relationship. So there's no real difference between openning a can and popping the dog into the base charger.
Real pet or robo pet, you have to feed them both. Unless you have barn cats that eat mice and drink rainwater. Then you have the ultimate in self sufficiency. But they're not very cuddly and don't live long.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
A separate issue is Sony's claim against the distribution of independently-created programs for the Aibo. In this area, Sony is attempting to use the DMCA in an unfortunate way. But while the sites providing such information are violating more basic, longstanding tenets of copyright law, they don't have the slightest chance of being taken seriously.
The creation of content for a platform, based on reverse engineering of that platform, has some legal precedent. The "unauthorized" creation of games for Nintendo consoles was one example that actually went to court and was found to be legal. If the DMCA prevents such actions, independently created programs for the Aibo would make a good basis for a test case to have these provisions overturned. However, the waters are so badly muddied by the distribution of Sony's copyrighted material, that a successful legal defense of these sites is probably all but impossible. These sites bring this on themselves - they should stick to distributing things that they have created, and they'll be on much firmer ground, and might even find that organizations like the EFF or ACLU would be willing to defend them.
Afterwards though I asked the person who built it about the possibility of session hijacking and he said "security is the next thing we have to work on". So maybe you can sit in on the session now. Sticking the memory stick up the Aibo's butt was pretty hilarious though. The rest was pretty dry discussion of overall software idea and market, not a lot of meat for engineering types since I guess they don't want it to be hacked..
There are two new models that look like cute little pandas which most diehards don't like but young people seem to find cute enough to watnt to purchase.
Also Omron just came out with a robotic cat which I saw in a store (RanKing RanQueen, Shibuya Station 2F) two days ago. It looks like a hell kitty, in that it is a BIG cat (not a kitten) and while made up to look realistic it really isn't. Kind of like a cat nightmare. But it did have a number of interesting cat-like reactions to me even though it was stuck inside a plexiglass box. No info yet on future networking possibilities with it, but seems like it would be pretty easy to slide your own packages under the fur without anyone noticing!
This AIBO just isn't as cute as the last model. It's head is flat, and proportioned like a bulldog's, and the flashing lights under the shield are creepy. Old AIBO had proportions like a puppy, but this one is like a small adult dog, and we all know what the world thinks of toy dobermans and poodles.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
I still dig on AIBO, but until it is smart enough to home in on its base station and recharge itself when its batteries are running low, it's hard to consider AIBO ready for prime time.
If it was affordable and hackable (without getting lawyers involved) it could be a great, even useful, toy that would make furby look like a pile of puke.
No offense to the interesting furby hacks and hackers out there, but imagine a cheap less featured Aibo in millions of homes. Okay we all have PCs now, where are our damn robots?
BBC News is now reporting that Sony researchers are experimenting with increased speech capacity. Here's one of the first papers about the increased-capacity talking Aibo project. This is the English/HTML translation of the French/PDF version (which seems to be unavailable for download) and so is a little messy. Unfortunately, Sony's Computer Research Laboratory seems to be down at the moment. As an anthropologist interested in the evolution of speech, I'm absolutely fascinated by this, and whish I knew where to find more of the speech recognition software specs.
Do androids dream of electric sheep yet?
Do something about world hunger. Click here