AIBO
Encyclopedia
Robot
A robot is a mechanical or virtual intelligent agent that can perform tasks automatically or with guidance, typically by remote control. In practice a robot is usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by computer and electronic programming. Robots can be autonomous, semi-autonomous or...
ic pet
Pet
A pet is a household animal kept for companionship and a person's enjoyment, as opposed to wild animals or to livestock, laboratory animals, working animals or sport animals, which are kept for economic or productive reasons. The most popular pets are noted for their loyal or playful...
s designed and manufactured by Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
. There have been several different models since their introduction on May 11, 1999 although AIBO was discontinued in 2006.
Overview
AIBO is able to walk, "see" its environment via camera and recognize spoken commands in Spanish and English. AIBO robotic pets are considered to be autonomous robotAutonomous robot
Autonomous robots are robots that can perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous human guidance. Many kinds of robots have some degree of autonomy. Different robots can be autonomous in different ways...
s since they are able to learn and mature based on external stimuli from their owner, their environment and from other AIBOs. Artist Hajime Sorayama
Hajime Sorayama
is a Japanese illustrator, known for his precisely detailed, erotic airbrush portrayals of women and feminine robots.-Biography:Hajime Sorayama was born in 1947 in Imabari, Ehime prefecture, Japan. He received his basic education at Imabari Kita High School. In 1965 he was admitted to the Shikoku...
created the initial designs for the AIBO.
The original designs are part of the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
and the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
. The design won Sony and its designer Sorayama the highest design award that may be conferred by Japan. On January 26, 2006 Sony announced that it would discontinue AIBO and several other products as of March, 2006 in Sony's effort to make the company more profitable. It also stopped development of the QRIO
QRIO
QRIO was to be a bipedal humanoid entertainment robot developed and marketed by Sony to follow up on the success of its AIBO toy. QRIO stood approximately 0.6 m tall and weighed 7.3 kg...
robot. AIBO will still be supported until 2013 (ERS7 model) and AIBO technology will continue to be developed for use in other consumer products.
Memory Stick
Memory Stick is a removable flash memory card format, launched by Sony in October 1998, and is also used in general to describe the whole family of Memory Sticks...
. The Life AIBOware allows the robot
Robot
A robot is a mechanical or virtual intelligent agent that can perform tasks automatically or with guidance, typically by remote control. In practice a robot is usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by computer and electronic programming. Robots can be autonomous, semi-autonomous or...
to be raised from pup to fully grown adult while going through various stages of development as its owner interacts with it. The Explorer AIBOware allows the owner to interact with a fully mature robot able to understand (though not necessarily willing to obey) 100 voice commands. Without the AIBOware, the AIBO will run in what is called "clinic mode" and can only perform basic actions.
Many AIBO owners enjoy teaching their pets new behaviors by reprogramming them in Sony's special 'R-CODE' language. However, in October 2001, Sony sent a cease-and-desist notice to the webmaster of Aibopet, demanding that he stop distributing code that was retrieved by bypassing the copy protection
Copy protection
Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy obstruction, copy prevention and copy restriction, refer to techniques used for preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media, usually for copyright reasons.- Terminology :Media corporations have always used the term...
mechanisms of the robot. Eventually, in the face of many outraged AIBO owners, Sony released a programmer's kit for "non-commercial" use. The kit has now been expanded into three distinct tools: R-CODE, AIBO Remote Framework, and the OPEN-R SDK. These three tools are combined under the name AIBO Software Development Environment. All of these tools are free to download and can be used for commercial or non-commercial use (Except for the OPEN-R SDK, which is specifically for non-commercial use). Since the first release of OPEN-R, several AIBO programming tools have been developed by university labs, including URBI
URBI
Urbi is an open source cross-platform software platform in C++ used to develop applications for robotics and complex systems. Urbi is based on the UObject distributed C++ component architecture. It also includes the urbiscript orchestration language which is a parallel and event-driven script...
, Tekkotsu, Pyro
Python Robotics
Python Robotics is a project designed to create an easy-to-use interface for accessing and controlling a wide variety of real and simulated robots.-History:...
and AiBO+. The Open-R and GCC
GNU Compiler Collection
The GNU Compiler Collection is a compiler system produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages. GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain...
based toolchain
Toolchain
In software, a toolchain is the set of programming tools that are used to create a product...
has been updated by the community to use GCC 4.1.2, Binutils 2.17 and Newlib
Newlib
Newlib is a C standard library implementation intended for use on embedded systems. It is a conglomeration of several library parts, all under free software licenses that make them easily usable on embedded products....
2.15. The packaged version of the old and updated AIBO toolchain is available for Ubuntu
Ubuntu (operating system)
Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
in a PPA
Personal Package Archive
A Personal Package Archive is a special software repository for uploading source packages to be built and published as an APT repository by Launchpad or similar application. The term is currently used for Ubuntu packages, but targets "Everyone" according to Launchpad host, Canonical Ltd....
.
AIBO's complete vision system uses the SIFT
Scale-invariant feature transform
Scale-invariant feature transform is an algorithm in computer vision to detect and describe local features in images. The algorithm was published by David Lowe in 1999....
algorithm, to recognise its charging station. The newest versions are equipped with a Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...
connection, allowing them to send the pictures they take via email which led to the Roblog
Roblog
Roblog is a neologism for a blog written by a robot with no human intervention.Roblogs were made possible with a new generation of robots which are capable of uploading images and texts automatically to the Web...
.
AIBO's sounds were programmed by Japanese DJ/avant-garde composer Nobukazu Takemura
Nobukazu Takemura
Nobukazu Takemura is a Japanese musician whose style has run from jazz to house to drum and bass to chamber music to electronic glitch within less than a decade. Born in Hirakata, Osaka in August 1968, he became interested in punk and New Wave music when young...
, fusing mechanic and organic concepts. The bodies of the "3x" series (Latte and Macaron, the round-headed AIBOs released in 2001) were designed by visual artist Katsura Moshino. The aibo was mass produced by Sony.
RoboCup
The AIBO has seen use as an inexpensive platform for artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
research, because it integrates a computer, vision system
Computer vision
Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...
, and articulators in a package vastly cheaper than conventional research robots. The RoboCup
RoboCup
RoboCup is an international robotics competition founded in 1997. The aim is to develop autonomous soccer robots with the intention of promoting research and education in the field of artificial intelligence...
autonomous soccer competition had a "RoboCup Four-Legged Robot Soccer League" in which numerous institutions from around the world would participate. Competitors would program
Computer program
A computer program is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer. A computer requires programs to function, typically executing the program's instructions in a central processor. The program has an executable form that the computer can use directly to execute...
a team of AIBO robots to play games of autonomous robot soccer against other competing teams. The Four-Legged League ran from 1999 to 2008, although in the final year, many big-name universities did not compete as they had moved to the new NAO platform. The University of New South Wales was the most successful team in the League, making the final six times and winning three times.
International AIBO Convention
The International AIBO Convention takes place every year at Sony Robotics Tower in the Shinjuku prefecture. The first convention took place in 1999, on May 15. It was then set to May 2 to May 4. The 2009 convention, being in its tenth year, set attendance records. The convention usually features AIBO advertisements, free posters, free accessories, freeware/open-source downloads and "AIBO Shows".First generation models
- ERS-110: silver; began sales 1 June 1999 for delivery in August; limited production of 3,000 for Japan and 2,000 for the USA
- ERS-111: silver and black; November 1999
Estimated sales for all first generation models: 65,000
Second generation models
- ERS-210: black, silver, gold, red, blue, green, white (3 hues), champagne, etc.; 2001
- ERS-311 "Latte": cream; 2001
- ERS-312 "Macaron": black; 2001
- ERS-210A: several colors; 2002
- ERS-220: silver; 2002 (also available as a conversion kit for the ERS-210)
- ERS-31L "Pug": brown; 2002
- ERS-311B "Latte": cream; 2002
- ERS-312B "Macaron": black; 2002
- ERS-210A: cyber blue; 2003
Estimated sales for all second generation models: 60,000
Third Generation models
- ERS-7: white; November 2003
- ERS-7M2: white and black; November 2004
- ERS-7M3: white, black, and champagne gold (called honey brown in Japan); October 2005
Estimated sales for all third generation models: 40,000 to 50,000
See also
- Domestic robotDomestic robotA domestic robot is a robot used for household chores. Thus far, there are only a few limited models, though science fiction writers and other speculators have suggested that they could become more common in the future...
- i-CybieI-Cybiei-Cybie is a robotic pet that resembles a dog. It was manufactured by Silverlit Electronics. The i-Cybie robot responds to sound, touch, voice commands via remote control. Although i-Cybie does possess a limited amount of artificial intelligence, programming is not easily modifiable by the...
, another robotic dog. - FurbyFurbyA Furby was a popular electronic robotic toy resembling a hamster/owl-like creature which went through a period of being a "must-have" toy following its launch in the holiday season of 1998, with continual sales until 2000...
, a robot toy made by Tiger Electronics. - Sony CISC, which gives telephone technical support for AIBO.
- QRIOQRIOQRIO was to be a bipedal humanoid entertainment robot developed and marketed by Sony to follow up on the success of its AIBO toy. QRIO stood approximately 0.6 m tall and weighed 7.3 kg...
, a humanoid robot also developed by SonySony, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues.... - ASIMOASIMOis a humanoid robot created by Honda. Introduced in 2000, ASIMO, which is an acronym for "Advanced Step in Innovative MObility", was created to be a helper to people. With aspirations of helping people who lack full mobility, ASIMO is used to encourage young people to study science and mathematics...
, a humanoid robot created by Honda. - PleoPleoPleo is an animatronic pet dinosaur toy designed to emulate the appearance and behavior of a week-old baby Camarasaurus. It was designed by Caleb Chung, the co-creator of the Furby, Chung's company Ugobe sold pleo and was manufactured by Jetta...
, robotic dinosaur. - NaoNao (robot)Nao is an autonomous, programmable, medium-sized humanoid robot, developed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French startup company headquartered in Paris. Project Nao was launched in 2004. On August 15, 2007, Nao replaced Sony's robot dog Aibo as the robot used in the Robot Soccer World Cup Standard...
, a humanoid robot replacing AIBO in Robocup competitions. - GeniboGenibo- GENIBO :The Genibo QD is an autonomous pet robot, similar in concept to Sony's 'ERS-7' Aibo, but was created to be much more dog-like in appearance and behavior....
, a robotic dog from Dasarobot. - UCHILSIM, a physics based simulator of AIBO robots competing in RoboCup.