The Korean start-up Kortech has just announced its Rogun, a humanoid, 1-meter tall robot with advanced skills.
“Rogun is capable of guarding homes around the clock; the camera-eyed robot will give a warning to its owner via cell phone when strangers visit an empty house”, Korntech CEO Lee Dong-hwan said.
Right now, the machine would cost a whopping $100,000, but the company expects that its price could drop to $5,000 in “a near future”.
(Via Engadget)
A press release from the company presents “PaPeRo Mini”, a droid-like mobile robot. As the name suggests, the machine is smaller than previous versions of PaPeRo (25 cm tall instead of 38 cm).
As before, the PaPero Mini intends to serve as a “conversational robot”: it can move around and is able to perform speech recognition, speech synthesis, sound source detection and face recognition.
I’m not sure they intend to sell it on a short time basis though.
(Image: © Nec)
EPFL got an audio interview with Rodney Brooks, Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-founder of iRobot, in which he speaks about the future of domestic robots:
“The projects I’m really interested in right now are getting robots to manipulate the world. Successful robots that are commercially available are all navigation machines: they navigate around and they do some tasks, like cleaning the floor […]. The real, widespread use robots, is gonna be when robots can touch the world and physically manipulate it.”
(This interview is part of a series of very interesting podcasts conducted by EPFL)
Thanks to Jean-Michel Billaut, you can watch a short - but nice - clip showing Nao in action. Nao, built by French start-up Aldebaran Robotics, will try to compete with advanced domestic humanoid robots from Asia. The Linux-based, Wi-Fi equipped robot will walk, dance, understand voice commands, recognize faces and it will be “teachable by the user”.
I interviewed Bruno Maisonnier, Aldebaran’s CEO, last year, and I’m really happy to see that the project is doing well. Interestingly, he confirms in the video that:
“Limited versions of Nao will be on sale at the end of 2007, with a full commercial launch by early 2008; the expected retail price will be in the EUR2,500-3,000 range.”
