AIBO Inventor Creates Dancing Humanoid

Speecys Corp., a venture firm launched by robot engineer Tomoaki Kasuga, the creator of Sony Corp.'s AIBO robot dog, said Tuesday it will start selling a small humanoid robot that can sing, dance, read the news and give English language lessons, among other things.

Sony cancelled production of Aibo last year.

The mostly white, 33-centimeter high, 1.5-kilogram MI RAI-RT robot will be priced at 294,000 yen (US $2500). The company will start accepting orders via the Internet on Sept. 30."

MI-RAI-rt is fully articulated and connected via wireless LAN to the internet. The robots maintain contact with each other through a new website called Robotamia.

The site will also serve as a central point for the community of owners of MI-RAI's. Since I do not understand Japanese and there is no English translation for the page I suspect it is also where the MI-RAI will coordinate their plan for world domination.

The robots will be able download to read the news, sing and dance and tell fortunes. They can also get English lessons, quizzes and games from Robotamia.

Also they will be able to read email and messages with full body language.

Speecys says they are pioneering the concept of 3D message communications by allowing the sender of messages to control the movement of the robot as it speaks. The movement instructions will be sent in the message with RTML Robot Transaction Markup Language.

Speecys was in the news last year for announcing the first robot powered by fuel cells.



Creator of AIBO to launch dancing humanoid robot - MSN-Mainichi Daily News