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Banryu, Robot Or Dragon?
Roland Piquepaille writes "When Yoichi Takamoto, president of the small Japanese company Tmsuk, decided to build a robotic guard for your house, he was not able to use the familiar design of a dog. The idea was already taken by Sony, with its successful Aibo. Instead, he decided to develop the Banryu (or "guard dragon") robots. After all, nobody has ever seen a real dragon. So he was free to design it as he wished. The result is a scary robot which is 90 centimeters tall, weighs 35 kilograms, has more than 50 built-in sensors and can transmit an alarm to its master's cell phone if someone tries to invade the house. It doesn't come cheap. The price is about $18,000, but you can choose between five colors. The Asahi Shimbun tells us the story, while this overview includes several pictures of the frightening dragon." This is scary?
dragon? Don't they mean cow? Seriously now, does this resemble a dragon more or a cow?
Even with 50 sensors and a system to read and process the data, how do they come up with $18,000? If it could walk up stairs, right itself, etc, I might understand, but it doesn't look that way. I can cobble together a PC, appropriate sensor receivers (BTW, what do they need 50 sensors for? Every joint?), and some software for a heck of a lot less than that. It wouldn't look as cool, but it would do the same thing.
To disarm it, just throw lots of water on it. "Bow Wow Bo....zzzzzzt!"
A more cost-effective solution would be to put video cameras all over your yard. An intrusion detector could set off your pager/phone and you could log in on the web at work to look around.
Table-ized A.I.
Where do they mount the blast cannon, in the hump? I bet the poison needle is the only reason they bothered giving it the head. Needs a Cylon roving lead display on the head, too. It also looks like the legs are too stubby to properly leap and grab people's face with the metal blades that you would just have to add to the leg units. And, somewhere or another, there should be at LEAST one taser. All in all, needs work, but sign me up once you add the accessory package. Although, if you add th lethal enhancements, please for the love of the gods don't let it be running a Microsoft OS.