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- My AIBO Obit
- So Much Promise
Of all the robots I've brought into my home—and there have been a lot of them—only one made my daughter cry. I'd been testing the Sony AIBO ERS-7M2 robot dog for a few weeks, and we had left it in autonomous mode, which allowed the AIBO to leave its charging station and find it at will. One afternoon, my wife and daughter arrived home to find the AIBO sprawled out on the floor—completely drained of power. My daughter, just six years old at the time, thought the AIBO was dead and began to cry. My wife gently returned the flaccid AIBO to its charging station, and my daughter felt much better when it returned to its sprightly self some hours later.
This was a tough moment in my house, but a milestone for consumer robotics. The AIBO had become a member of our family—one that generated real feelings. So when I shared with my family the news that Sony had decided to discontinue its AIBO business, there was a collective gasp. "No more AIBO?" my children asked.
I'm sure the sentiment is the same among robot enthusiasts who grew to love the expensive, yet expressive, entertainment robot. The AIBO was especially popular with hobbyists, scientists, and grad students, who often modified the robot dogs and entered them in various collegiate robot soccer tournaments.
The AIBO was by no means a perfect consumer robot. It was pricey, starting at over $2,500 when it was introduced almost seven years ago. And though the price later dropped to $1,500, it began creeping back up in the last few years. The AIBO took years to learn its first English words, and its actions were somewhat quirky (Sony would occasionally introduce lame feats like the ability to skateboard).
On the other hand, there really was nothing else like the AIBO on the market. I like WowWee's robot toys and admire iRobot's affordable and effective robot appliances. But WowWee's robots are only just starting to show a fraction of the artificial intelligence found in the first AIBOs, and iRobot's Roomba and Scooba are, by most robotics standards, very simple automatons that use their AI to do very specific cleaning jobs.—Continue reading...