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Tokyo University and Toyota Develop New Home Assistant Robot

 The Center of IRT (CIRT ) at the University of Tokyo announced on Oct. 24 a new humanoid robot that can help with household chores. The new robot called AR (for Assistant Robot) was developed under a joint project between Prof. Masayuki Inaba's team and Toyota.

(Photograph borrowed from ROBOT WATCH)

AR is about 1.6 meters tall and weighs 130kg. It has 32 degrees of freedom - 3 on the neck and head, 7 on both arms, 6 on each hands, 1 on the hip and 2 on the wheels.

The robot has 3 key functions according to ROBOT WATCH.

1. It can recognize the environment by combining the data from its laser rangefinder and stereo camera.

2. It can create motions based on a 3D geometric model.

3. It can visually determine whether its task was successful or not, and if not, it can try again.

The group showed AR picking up a tray and bringing it to the sink, pick up a T shirt from a chair and put it in the washer and then press the button as well as sweeping the floor.  It seems to have taken a lot of time for AR to accomplish these tasks but you can see the videos on ROBOT WATCH.

Besides AR, CIRT is working on 3 other robots which will all be announced by the end of this year. A personal mobility robot that can carry a single passenger, a kitchen robot and a type of robot that is "attached to" humans (whatever this means).

Walking iPhone Robot

Kazu Terasaki, a Japanese software engineer working in the Silicon Valley area, turned his iPhone into a robot. He showed it off for the first time at a BBQ party held here.

Kazu is a "moonlight inventor" and his inventions that have been commercialized in the past include ThumbType (a tiny keyboard that you can paste on your PDA) and Weird7 (a biped robot kit).

He was also involved in a product called PuchiRobo which is another robot kit that enables you to turn anything from a beer can to a tissue box into a walking robot. That technique is used in making his iPhone walk too. Right now you need a PC to move the robot, but in the future he'd like to come up with a chip too, so that you can just paste everything on your beer and it will come walking to you. The cute moving eye balls are also an application he created for the iPhone.

Kazu's expertise and motto is "to surprise people by creating new stuff using just ordinary technhology." His ideas and perspective have brought in a breath of fresh air to the robotics community in Japan where engineers generally want to use the most advanced and expensive techonologies.

Here is another video of the walking iPhone made by Kazu himself (although it's not quite my taste).

Keepon is Now on Sale!

For those who've been asking.......YES! The cuddly cute robot Keepon is now on sale! The creators of Keepon - Hideki Kozima in Japan and Marek Michalowski in the U.S. - have started a company - BeatBots LLC - to commercialize the robot. They are working with Japan's Kokoro Company to manufacture a research-level version called Keepon Pro.

Right now, at a base price of $30,000 a bot, Keepon Pro is expected to sell mostly to research institutions for studies in Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and to museums. But if you wait a little while, they are "planning to come out with a new version which will use a simpler mechanism and have a cheaper price tag," says Kozima-san, who on Oct. 1 just changed jobs from NICT (where he spent the last 14.5 years) to become a professor at Miyagi University.

For those who are unfamiliar with Keepon, it is a robot initially developed by Prof. Kozima to do research on interaction between robots and children - thus the cuddly features. His observations of autistic children playing with Keepon have led him to think about the quintessence of autism and ways of applying such robots to therapeutic care.

Meanwhile, Marek, who is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, met Prof. Kozima through a former advisor and developed software that made Keepon react to rhythms and music. When he posted a video of a dancing Keepon to YouTube, it became a global sensation. WIRED Magazine produced a promotion video last year with Keepon and the rock band Spoon.

Now Marek is exploring the role of rhythm in human-robot social interaction using Keepon as his thesis platform. Humans nod and display rhythmic motions when communicating with each other, but how about robots? Would robots be able to communicate with people more efficiently if they used rhythmic synchrony?

HRI is a hot topic in the robotics community and some groups use advanced humanoid robots to do research. Keepon, on the other hand, represents a minimalistic approach. Its appearance and behavior are simple yet dynamic and expressive enough to be able to conduct meaningful social research.

AND it's cute - bringing us back to Keepon Pro. Since its YouTube debut, the public has clamored to see more Keepon, so Kozima-san and Marek have been busy traveling around the world to invited events. And people started asking them whether they were ever going to commercialize it. The two won the Robots at Play Prize in Denmark last year, and that prize money went into starting the company.

Keepon Pro is only the first product from BeatBots. Their business plan is to design, develop and market new robots that can be used in research, therapy and entertainment.

(An update on this story here.)