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Two-Legged Home Robot, Coming Soon To Japan
An anonymous reader submits "Two Japanese companies, (ZMP corp., and Mizuno, a athletic goods manufacturer), announced that they will start selling the first two-legged robot for home use. The robot, called nuvo, will retail for 500,000 yen. It wil be able to understand 1,000 (Japanese) words, dance, and allow the owner to contact the robot via 3G phones."
Anyone care to fansub this article?
Nice picture though.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
War driving to conquer japan with mad freaking robots .... hopefully they'll not think about bluetooth ... :)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I guess there's a market for this kind of thing in Japan. The mean age in Japan is approaching 70 and many of these older persons are living alone, so there are a lot of seniors that will require assistance with their daily life. A robot that can fetch medicine or notify the owner that it is time to take medicine or even notify the authorities if the owner doesn't move for more than a specified time.
More than just "wow, this is cool! Imagine a beowulf cluster of these", this robot is a significant step forward for the assisted-living technological front.
I have been pwned because my
I for one welcome our new overlord nuvo
Just what the porn industry needs. Wait till the makers of Real Doll create a version that walks, talks....and fucks.
Actually, I might pay for that. *grin*
Life is not for the lazy.
It will be able to understand 1,000 words, dance, and allow you to contact it via 3G phones
sounds like most girls you meet in clubs today...
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
Why do you want it to talk?
Since nobody has noted it yet, 500,000 yen is about $4,500.
Source: http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic
The 2-pair-of-shoes bipedal robot which can play at home is put on the market just over or below [ one ] 500,000 yen also at the end of this year. It was opened to the public on the 2nd by "nuvo (?-bow)" which the venture business "ZMP" of robot development and Mizuno, a major sporting-goods company, developed jointly. The loan but for advertisement of a company famous is a center, generally "QRIO (KYURIO)" of Sony and "ASIMO (ASHIMO)" of Honda turn a 2-pair-of-shoes bipedal robot, and sale is new. nuvo is the height of 39cm, and the weight of 2.5km. It walks all around, and when it falls, supine and either which lies prone also rise by himself. About 1000 words of a conversation level are made to be memorized every day, and it salutes or dances according to directions. A camera is built in a face. The screen seen from the robot is checked from a going-out place using the 3rd generation cellular phone of NTT DoCoMo, and it becomes the "surveillance robot" which can also do remote control. The cost of development lessened this joint and held down the price. 3000 or more sets of sale are expected in the first year. (03/03 08:02)
Here is a translation in... well, something like English.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
The fish sucks for japanese, use excite.co.jp instead:
excite translation
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
It has a funny way of walking! Watch the video.
But it won't do the dishes, though...
A two-legged robot that can play at home will be sold at the end of the year at 500,000 yen (less than $5,000) per robot. Robot development venture ZMP and Sportswear maker Mizuno jointly developed "nuvo" -- released on March 2.
Among two-legged robots, Sony's QRIO and Honda's ASIMO are popular. Howver, they are mostly rented out, and serve purposes of advertisement -- not aimed at sale to the general public.
nuvo is 39 cm tall, 2.5 kg. It can walk in all four directions, and when it falls in either direction, it can get up with its own strength. It can be taught 1,000 words for daily colloquial speech. It can also do such things as bowing and dancing upon being instructed.
The face has a built-in camera. Using a 3G cell phone, images viewed by the robot can be confirmed, and remote operation can be practiced, making it a surveilance robot.
Joints, which are costly to develop, were minimized to lower its price. The companies look forward to selling 3,000 items by the beginning of next year.
here of press event, hosted at PC watch. The robot can recover from fallen down state by himself. Enjoy
Michael Flatley I'm not, but I - even in my inherent inability to grasp the simplest dance steps - could hardly call that dancing.
PS - For those wondering about the video post slashdotting, imagine an akward looking slot machine with pointlessly complex legs wobbling aimlessly across a stage in a rythm and fashion in no way whatsoever resembling the happy-love-fun-time-gogogo japanese techno music playing in the background.
Then call that "dancing".
Here is a rough translation of this article. It is late, sue me. :)
At the end of the year, for 500,000 yen (approx. $5000) it will be possible to take home a new bipedal robot. Created jointly by a venture company (ZMP) and Mizuno Sports, the NUVO, as it's called, was revealed for 2 days.
While Sony's QRIO and Honda's ASIMO made bipedal robots famous for advertising, it is rare to have a robot directed at the general buyer.
NUVO, stands at a height of 39 cm and has a weight of 2.5 kgs. The robot can walk forwards and back, left and right, and if it happens to fall down, it is able to pick itself back up. In addition, the robot understands in the reach of about 1000 words, and it can preform various functions such as bowing and dancing.
Also, with a camera located in its head, NUVO owners can use NTT Docomo 3G Cell phone technology to see what the robot is seeing, and also control the robot from a distance.
The cost breakup was not given, but around 3000 units are expected to sell at the beginning of next year.
500,000 Yen = 3,996.48 dollars.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
The US already has this... The Robo Sapien ...Japan is sooo behind the US in technology...they need to catch up(sarcasm)...The robosapien is much better...well atleast it looks alot better...
Look at Slashdot Japan article
snurf-kin wrote:
I want maid-robot!
...and Annoymous Cowerd replies:
There are no market for robots without Hentai("moe") element!
Both of above comments area moderated +2,Funny & Insightful
This is the mindset of Japanese geek,sad fact...
A google news link.
you may be interested in this:
Mobility on planetary surfaces: may walking machines be a vable alternative.pdf
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
A sequel has just been announced for the sequel to the critically acclaimed movie, You Got Served. This film, entitled You Got Served Again, will reportedly center around a group of dancing teenage robots trying to prove their worth while dealing with the challenges they encounter growing up on the tough assembly lines of Japan.
A robot that moves using two legs is a bad move designwise. While we as humans need them (or rather needed them) for traversing different types of terrain, this bipedal robot can't even do that, making it having two legs pointless.
This is obviously a toy plain and simple, but you can't help wonder what kind of super maneveurable robot they could have created had they ploughed their efforts into something less pointless.
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
A two legged robot that you can play with in your home will be available as early as the end of this year for 500000 yen. Venture company ZMP and sports equipment company Mizuno, together announced on the 2nd.
As for 2 legged robots, Sony's QRIO and Honda's ASIMO are famous, but they are mainly for publicity purposes and are rarely purchased for general use.
nuvo is 39 centimeters, and 2.5 kilograms. It can walk forward, backward, left, or right, and if it falls, can get up automatically from any position. It can be taught about 1000 words, follow directions, (something [jishiki?]) or dance.
In the head is a camera. Using NTT DoCoMo 3rd generation phones, you can see from the robot's perspective, and use it as a remote controlled "security robot".
Minimizing the use of joints allowed the cost to remain low. Over 3000 orders are expected by the new year.
Except the robot is useless for that. No hands for medicine and the camera will not be sufficiently well-placed for monitoring. There will only be a single (low-res) viewpoint of the world from low to the ground. There will be too many false alarms from sleeping, watching TV or just out of the house!
Nope. The Japanese fixation with humanoid robots is not going to help caring for the elderly any time soon. We have no good way of dealing with flexible materials, no good vision-based object recognition for reasonable sets of objects and no way of doing truly dextrous manipulation (two arms at once!).
When someone produces a cheap robot with reasonable sensors and an open source development environment, we many be getting somewhere. Then, instead of reading Slashdot, you could be programming your own robot.
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
Damn Babelfish... but they'll never put ME out of a job! (yet)
Here's my translation:
"A robot that can play in your household is going to be sold by the end of the year for roughly 5,000,000 yen. [translator's note: i.e. a lot of sushi] Both ZMP and maker of sports goods Mizuno, both having collaborated in this venture, have developed a robot called "nuvo", which was displayed to the public on the 2nd of this month.
[translators note: the robot's actual japanese characters are a bit cheeky.... one hiragana "nu" and one katakana "bo"... so it's name actually breaks typical Japanese writing traditions)]
Whilst the the two-legged robot "Qrio" from Sony and the "Asimo" from Honda are well-known, the marketing budgets for these robots haven't really been aimed at selling themselves to the general public.
Nuvo comes in at 39 centimeteres , and weighs it at 2.5 kilos. It can walk backwards and forwards, as well as left and right. When it falls over it lands on its back and stays down, getting up all by itself. It remembers close to 1000 words of conversation level Japanese, and upon instruction it can bow as well as dance.
It's head contains a built in camera. Utilising NTT DoCoMo's third generation cell phone technology, it is possible to view what the robot sees on the cell-phone's screen, technically becoming a remote control "surveillance robot".
Through the joint venture, it's development costs were held down. It is expected to sell over 3000 units in it's first year of sales."
So yeah, it's one damn small security robot....
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I've seen this about 4 or 5 month ago:
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO
Oh sweet a new era of battlebots...
not only do the bots slug it out, you also get to hear their masters yelling commands in japanese!
hmmm how do you say "ROBOT RIGHT CROSS" in japanese
it'd be cooler if the robots could speak, then they could trash talk each other....it'd be a half hour of action and crazy talk
A domestic robot that walks on two legs could be on the market at 500,000 yen per unit early next year. Robot development venture ZMP has teamed up with major sports equipment company Mizuno to develop the Nuvo, it was revealed on the 2nd.
Bipedal robots such as Sony's Qrio and Honda's Asimo have already appeared but offerings directed at the general public have been rare.
Nuvo stands 39 cm high and weighs 2.5 kg. It can walk forward, back, left and right and if it falls over it can get up no matter which way up it is. It has a conversational vocabulary of nearly 1,000 words, and can obey an instruction to bow or dance.
The face contains an built-in camera. Using a 3rd generation NTT DoCoMo mobile phone the user can see through the robot's eye, so it can even fuction as a remote-controlled 'guard robot'.
Price was kept low by reducing the amount of expensive-to-develop joints. The makers hope to sell upwards of 3000 units in the first year.
----
Too late to karma whore, but I like translating things...
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
There is an English article at the Japan times
If this really is intended for home use, I'd question the value of legs. Granted, this is from the land that produced Battletech and assorted Mech shows, but we've already seen a robot that can climb stairs on wheels. Surely a wheeled robot would be infinitely more stable that this one. Come home drunk and walk into a wheeled 'bot and you've stubbed your toe a bit. Walk into a walking bot and you could knock it over, damaging and possibly breaking it.
And it can wiggle.
That's it?
But can it do the dishes? Vacuum? Take out the rubbish? Press the TV channel change button?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
House robots need to do just a few useful things..
Get x
Put x
Get paper from curb
Get beer from fridge
Get book from shelf
Get remote from table
Get phone from cradle
Put item into the trash
Put toy in child's room
Turn on/off light
Dogs can be trained to do this stuff. Why not robots?
Of course, it has to be able to keep itself charged.
Robots will become even more useful and desirable when they can start doing particalar tasks:
Wash dishes
Take out trash
Scrub toilet
Change cat box
Vacuum floor
Do laundry
Don't talk to me about Roomba. I'm talking about a _generally_ smart humanoid robots that is capable of using other dumb machines to accomplish a task. I wish IBM would spend research dollars on this rather than research how to play a better game of chess. (Not that don't like chess!)
This allows for two things:
1) If the dumbs are designed to be used by a human, then the work can done interchangebly by human or robot. Robots will be ultimately replaceable.
Suppose you have a really competent roobmba, that keeps the floor nice and clean. So much so that you no longer have a vaccuum, becuase the roomba is the tool for the job. When the roomba breaks, you are sol.
If you have a dedicated (potentially non-humanoid) robot for each dedicated task, we beging to lose control of our environment and become dependant on the robots.
But an intelligent humanoid robot can step in right now and start using the tool already available to to any number of tasks.
If the robot breaks, humans can step and clean the bathroom with the same tools the robots has been using. Or, you will only need a single set of redundant intelligence in case of failure.
2) By keeping the intelligence (and the expense of intelligence) in a humanoid form, we gain a lot by allowing the peripheral tools to remain dumb -- and therefore cheap and "the same as it has always been."
The Robotic Age will not look much different than the age we are in now. All of the same stuff will be in place and work the same way. It's just that there will this additional robot that does some of the work.
As voice recognition becomes more tenable, it would be nice to put that complexity in one place for consumers. Instead of having the microwave, tv, a/c and lighting system each having their own voice recognition system -- ("TV, turn off." and "AC, set temperature to 74 degrees.") We can have a single system in a robot that can respond to our voice commands and operate all the existing dumb systems in our current households.
In my imagination, robots like what I'm envisioning above will be significant purchases for households, on the order of a vehicle purchase. They would be financed. You would have one or two per house. They would be insured.
Software Wars
Once they get to that point, making robots bipedal will make sense... since these robots will then be able to go where we go. Heh, I always wondered how R2D2 managed to travel more than 3 meters over the sands of Tatooine... but C3PO just walked across.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
For the metrically challenged "39-centimetre-tall" is roughly 16 inches high. Woohoo. That'll scare burglars, especially with those blue balls on the end of its arms. For that price, I think I'll stick to the low-tech version that comes with an environmently friendly wind-up key.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
http://www.irobotnow.com ;)
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
What they want is sexy, anime babe robots with which they can have sex. The first real, affordable sex robot will sell millions. Porn drove the acceptance of the VCR and the Internet. It will drive VR and robotics. Accept it.
--- Ban humanity.
it takes on the 'big wooden rollers' challenge on Takeshi's Castle ("Extreme Elimination" on SpikeTV in US). Let's see it do a face-plant on one of those logs and then smile when it gets out of the mud. Then I'll be impressed.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
If you scroll about halfway down the asahi.com article you'll find links to videos labeled [WMP] and [REAL].
Asimo it ain't, but interesting looking (although it seems to have trouble with the "STOP!" command...).
Once they get to that point, making robots bipedal will make sense... since these robots will then be able to go where we go.
No, a bipedal design is just silly. We are bipeds solely because the body plan from which we evolved only had four limbs with which to work. Compared to most other mammals -- quadripeds -- we are slow, clumsy, and prone to fall and crack our giant heads open like overripe canteloupes.
If you want a truly sensible design, you would make a body plan with at least four legs, with the torso mounted in the exact center. Like a centaur, except with the human body shifted back to the middle of the horse's body instead of the front. Compared to a biped, a creature (or robot) like that would be far more stable than a biped, much swifter, better able to navigate rough terrain, and less likely to seriously injure its vital parts (head/torso) in a fall. A six-limbed design just makes more sense than a four-limbed one, at least when you have to devote two of the limbs to manipulation rather than locomotion.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
If you want a truly sensible design, you would make a body plan with at least four legs, with the torso mounted in the exact center. Like a centaur, except with the human body shifted back to the middle of the horse's body instead of the front.
And then rebuild all cars to support this new shape, or my new robot isn't going to be driving me anywhere any time soon.
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