The Tokyo toy show is in full swing and we are not there …….aarggh!

The i-sobot @ 2.28 looks like it is going to be a big deal when released (hype?). The one shown in the video is the standard edition which is available any day now ($258). There is also a cam i-sobot scheduled for release in October. It can send pics to your PC or phone via WiFi and is voice activated ($344).

video - credits

Meet HRP-3 Promet Mk-II from Kawada Industries. A robot which will eventually replace many manual jobs performed by humans today. On the market for a cool $3 million he can handle rain, slippery surface, use tools.

The math doesn’t ad up but still would be very cool to have a robot workforce. Wait we have that already we are the robotic workforce!!!

Unplug Now……….

Great video on Robot Culture in Japan by TokyoEye. Info on where to buy your robot kits in Tokyo and where to meet up with other robot otaku enthusiasts. Also features quite possibly the coolest arcade robot game you have ever seen.

Hasbro are releasing a series of toy electronics that turn into robots known as the ‘The Real Gear Transfomers’ ala Soundwave style as a tie in with the Transformer Movie (release date July 4th).

Some real world functionality wouldn’t have gone a miss ie: the camera turning into a usb webcam (one for the toy mashup/homebrew makers). From what I can find on the Transformers website they will be relased same day as the Movie itself. Source - Engadget

Meet ‘Miuro‘ (music innovation based on utility robot technology). The new Japanese robot from ZMP. It twists and rolls to iPod tunes in an intricate dance based on complex mathmatics (chaos theory). What makes it special is that it’s dancing isn’t preprogrammed, but generated by the robot in real time in sync with the music it is playing via the iPod player that locks into the machine.

The cool stuff….Miuro can be programmed like an alarm clock so it wheels into the bedroom and blasts music at a certain time.

Miuro will use built-in sensors to seek out people to play tunes to.

It can stream music from your computer…

How much ? Miuro is currently only for sale in Japan but should be coming to the West for the fourth quater with an expected retail value of $850 (£425).

The thought of Miuro wheeling into the bedroom and streaming Limbiq Frequencies at 7.00 in the morning is too much. I will defintly be buying one of these.

This is yet another dinosaur robot which will be a big hitter this Christmas. It has a retail value of $200 (£100) and is the brainchild of Caleb Chung the creator of the furby.

What sets this robotic dinasaur from the rest is it’s range of activities and emotions that can be modified via online software. Emotions include - nipping, coughing, yawning, snoring, expressing joy, anger and fear….

Ugobe (the toy producer) proclaim it to be “the first truly autonomous life-form.” They are wrong in thinking this as I am!

As mentioned before in an earlier post on our blog we are constantly looking for ways to automate tasks by using robots. Now blogging can take a lot of your time as a lot of you reading this can testify. It is time consuming to locate appropriate and good looking content on the web for your blog. NEC may have the solution! They have developed a system that facilitates simple and easy creation of multi-media rich blogs by carrying out the background work for the user. This means the robot will take care of searching for images, videos and content. They have developed a new system for automatically creating multi-media blogs with these…….

The PaPeRo Robots

PaPeRo Robot Translating

PaPeRo Robot giving directions

The key features of PapeRo the Robot

You can chat with PaPeRo to create your daily blog

The speech contents of the video message are converted into text and extracted through large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition technology. Multi-media web contents matching the extracted keywords are then uploaded and edited on the user’s blog, enabling effortless creation of a multi-media blog.

Natural language, text retrieval technology enables searching for internet media

Analyzing the syntactic relationship, such as direct objects and predicate verbs, the system calculates similarities between the text in the contents on the internet and the video message text converted by a speech recognition engine (developed with a large database of spoken words). This allows searching and accurate location of multi-media contents suitable to the contents of the text message.

NEC is currently working on this system toward early commercialization. We will keep you updated on availability. Some day soon RoboTokyo will be run using PaPeRo. Nec if you are reading this can you send us a PaPeRo robot for beta testing thank you.

Source - http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/0703/0501.html

Woahh Robot Fanboys check out this amazing replica model of B9 from Lost in Space on ebay. Starting price @ $15k. You can operate B9 from the inside - just like the original TV robot. The robot took two years to construct and looks more like the original robot than many fan creations. Features included are rotating torso, extendable rubber arms with locking pins, authentic voice-activated neon and sound system, Removable powerpack turns robot on/off. To top it off B9 is signed by Bob May (actor inside original robot). Bid now | Add to watch list

Meet Domo the new upper-torso humanoid robot from the MIT CSAIL Humanoid Robotics Lab. Domo is a robot with functioning, human-like eyes, arms and hands. It is the latest robot from the American developer Aaron Edsinger.

The goal of Domo is to contribute a novel approach to robot manipulation in unstructured environments. The approach is centered on integrating compliant and force sensitive manipulators into a behavior based architecture that accomplishes useful manipulation tasks in human environments.

It is a major advance on assembly-line robots as it can sense its surroundings and does not work to a pre-programmed routine.

You can imagine in the not so distant future robots similar to Domo doing all manual labour jobs on planet Earth! Here at RoboTokyo we are considering starting the RoboForce robot labour agency. We will hire out robotic workforces to factories, offices and domestic households. Is this a viable business plan (outside of Japan) What do you think?

See Domo in Action…

Helping clean up

Helping with chores

Read more at http://people.csail.mit.edu/edsinger/domo.htm