« Keepon is Now on Sale! | Main | Tokyo University and Toyota Develop New Home Assistant Robot »

October 16, 2008

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).

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83454089b69e201053587c445970b

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Walking iPhone Robot:

Comments

I can't deny that japanese software engineers are really good at that.

Awesome! It is really cute!

Awesome! invention! It really just proved how intelligent humans are.

Hi,
It looks like that the person is controlling the iPhone via PC. But I must say that the technology is gaining much advancement day by day and it is just great. Thanks for sharing it with us.

Essay Help

There are some specific things that are not mentioned here. I will look for more details because I didn't hear about it before.

Excellent articles plus comments nice one.

your good collection and very clean video.Keep continue your work in future

Yes This was the amazing video, I never see before, good and continue your work.

Amazing video really very impressive, i never saw to walking a I-phone before. you done very well when this robot you will announce in market i really appreciate for your working.
dissertations

It looks like he is controlling it from his pc, check this one, the motion is controlled by the phone for real!

http://a.parsons.edu/~lik43/doc/?p=796

OK, there was a peep last week. In a blog post titled “using delicious on your i phone” on the Delicious blog, they say “We know we haven’t updated the blog in a looting...

Oe8Wsk jnT3bz8Qpgj62BaK3ldfTm

Hi RobotGrrl! Thank you for your comment. Yes, he's controlling it via his PC now, as I mention in the article. But he'll be working on it so we have something to look forward to!

Why does it look like he's controlling it via a PC? :/
For all we know... it could just be an Arduino on the back of the iPhone, or something- not actually controlled by the iPhone. :(

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Working...
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been saved. Comments are moderated and will not appear until approved by the author. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Working...

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them.