GetRobo Blog English

Where can I buy MANOI GO?

 Since the MANOI GO made a performance at the ROBO-ONE GATE dance competition late last month, GetRobo has received several emails asking about where they can purchase this robot.  

 So I asked Sadahiro Arai - owner of the robot shop Technologia in Akihabara Tokyo. MANOI GO was developed by  MANOI producer Masayuki Okamoto and robot builder Dr. GIY. It's not meant to be a mass produced product but they are willing to customize and sell it to you for about 300,000 yen (about $3,400 in today's exchange rate).  It will include all the motion data and clothing but NOT the head spin component, which is too bad because I think most of the people that wanted to buy this were interested in the head spin. The reason for that is because the head spin component needs to be adjusted each time and they won't be able to provide the maintenance/support after they sold you the robot. 

 If you are still interested in owning this robot, please contact Arai-san at Technologia  or GetRobo. Meanwhile here is a video from the recent dance competition.

Speecys and Sega Toys to come out with new communication robot

 The founder and CEO of Speecys, Tomoaki Kasuga, was in Silicon Valley to give a presentation at TiEcon 2009. He is seeking 10 million dollars in funding to expand his business of developing and selling communication robots.

 During his stay in California, he made public that his company has teamed up with toy maker Sega Toys to jointly commercialize a new robot by the beginning of 2010. It is not clear at this point whether the new robot will be a humanoid or not. But what is clear is that it will have the capability to hook up with the network to download all sorts of information using voice command. Speecys has come up with a system to enable that - watch the video below.   

 In the future, Speecy's cloud computing system will allow advertisers to send personalised ads to the robot users. "Think of it as a new friendly IT device. Friendlier than the PC." says Kasuga-san. The new robot is targeted to be in the 200-500 dollar price range. 

 Speecys had been working on the NNR-1, but according to Kasuga-san, they are now focusing on the project with Sega. 

 Below is a photo of Kasuga-san doing a demo at Tiecon.

Biped MANOI GO does the breakdance - even the head spin!

 A version of the small humanoid robot MANOI does the break dance. Watch the first and last minute for the head spin!

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).

Sony's new music player Rolly

Sony announced it's new music player Rolly. It will hit the market in Japan on Sept. 29. The concept is similar to  miuro, but Rolly is smaller. And whereas miuro is autonomous and more "robotic" - it can follow you around from room to room and prevent itself from falling off from tables etc. - what Rolly basically does is show some cool movements that match the music.

According to an article on ITpro, Rolly was developed by some of the people that used to work on the AIBO at Sony. Although when they started talking about developing a new music player utilizing some AIBO technologies, they didn't know that AIBO was going to be discontinued. They started working on it seriously about a year and a half ago teaming up with the audio group.

The goal was to create a music player that would surprise people because of the sound quality coming out from something that is so small. The team put a lot of effort in figuring out the best balance between sound and motion - a bigger speaker meant better sound but less space for motors which were also important for interesting movements. AIBO's technology was utilized in creating quick but smooth and quiet movements so that they don't interfere with the music. The developers think that although Rolly is not a pet like AIBO, people will feel empathy for the player due to its movements.

Sony doesn't plan on doing big advertising on TV for this new product. The company is planning on using its blog and other word of mouth marketing strategies to sell Rolly.

According to Sony's press release, Rolly weighs 300g, battery life is about 4 hours with sound and motion, 3.5 hours when using Bluetooth, comes with 1GB flash memory. Price is expected to be around 40,000 yen ($350).

More photos and videos on ROBOT WATCH. You can see how you can control the volume and select songs by turning the wheels.