Cellular Phone Robot -CPR

And you thought that the new iPhone had alot of features. Wait until you see this baby!

This 'Cellular Phone Robot' is designed to become your own personal ubiquitous companion. It does everything but wipe your floors.

The CPR has wheels so that it can move. With RFID tags installed all around your house it will be able to find its own charger or even run around looking for you when it rings.
The motors are also used to express emotions for you about the incoming calls. But that's not all.

Engineers (obviously this thing was designed by engineers) at Soochunhyang University in Korea used biometric measuresments - ECG, XYZ, CIA - to measure the emotional response to various actions of the phone. They came up with cell phone robot emotions expressed in tactile, olfactory and visual behaviors.

Tactile: The mini-robot vibrates in 3 distinct patterns to evoke your emotional response. The patterns were based on the rhythms of emotional music.

Olfactory: The phone has 12 micronozzles to to emit just the right odor to identify the caller. Check out the 'stalker' call in the video. I wonder what that smells like? Of course the smell were tested using biometrics.

Visual: The phone does a little dance when someone calls. Happy dance. Stalker dance. All biometrically determined.

This was a video presented at the IROS 2006 conference in Beijing.

Maybe the iPhone seems cool but it still has a long way to go before it as ubiquitous or obnoxious as this little fellow.

Thanks to Jacob from USC for sending me this link.