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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."
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 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
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.