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Cell Phone-Controlled Household Robot Revealed
rocannon writes "Cellular News reports that Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a new robot for the home, the MARON-1, as a follow-up for the HOAP-1. MARON-1 is equipped with a wide range of functions including telephone, camera, remote control, timer and surveillance equipment, and can be remotely controlled by a cell phone to operate home electronic appliances or monitor household security."
Although this is produced by the same company as the HOAP-1, it has a very different focus. The HOAP was developed as a bipedal platform, to allow easier development of walking strategies and to allow developers to test out ideas about human-computer interactions. The development suite was released, and the main target was research groups. The MARON-1, on the other hand, is much more of a high-end consumer product. Instead of cutting edge work on balance and bipedal locomotion, they adopted the tried and true wheel-based design. Instead of releasing the development environment and focusing on research, they gave it a much more basic interface and tried to make it accessible to people without previous robotics experience. The list of features isn't very impressive or cutting edge. What is impressive is the fact that they have developed a platform which is robust and easy to control (or so they claim), in a variety of real-world situations. Although the cutting edge stuff like the HOAP is neat, without a base of real robots being used by real people, the field is just an academic exercise. The real tests of robotics for the near future will be in the areas of human-robot interactions, and in whether robots like this one will be able to fulfill their promises of ease-of-use and versitility.