GetRobo Blog English

Cute penguin robot is your Facebook companion - Arimaz

I got to sit down with Pierre Bureau, the founder and CEO of Arimaz in Switzerland, while he was visiting Silicon Valley. He showed me a demo of a prototype of a cute penguin robot that his company is planning to start selling in September for $99. The product is called MyDeskFriend. As the name proclaims, it is meant to be a small companion living on your desk. It comes with a docking station which is hooked up to the PC.

Here is the video of a quick demonstration. You can interact with the robot in multiple ways. It can follow your finger and will detect the edges of the your desk so that it doesn't fall over, thanks to 5 infrared sensors. There is also an accelerometer inside so it knows when it's being touched or shaken. The eyes will change color depending on the mood of the robot. If you shake it too much, it's eyes will turn red - meaning it's in a bad mood.

What's new about this robot is that you can connect it with your Facebook profile. There you can see that the robot is hungry or tired or needs exercise. You have to look after it like an artifcial pet. (You can feed a cookie when it's hungry.) The robot will read the messages from your friends as well as the weather forecast and news. Your friends can feed and interact with your robot remotely too through Facebook.

Cucumber slicing robot

 There's already been some reports about the cool robots at FOOMA JAPAN 2009, but here's another really cute food-handling robot that showed off it's skills there. And guess what? It's actually the ROBO-ONE robot Dynamizer made by the Sugiura Family! And the robot next to it is the Arimoplena by the Sumii Family sorting products. Since when did the battling bots start appearing at food trade shows?? In any case, that's great!