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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."
War driving to conquer japan with mad freaking robots .... hopefully they'll not think about bluetooth ... :)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
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)
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
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...
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
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
The mean age in Japan is approaching 70
Uh, I thought that sounded a little rediculus, so I thought I would check around. I was right according to the this: CIA Factbook
The mean and median ages are barely past forty.
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
I think the original quote had something missing.
The mean age of 69 to 71 year-olds in Japan is approaching 70
Predictive text is shiv!
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.