AIBO

A Personal Robot

Bob Thornburg

July 2009

The AIBO is now gone. Sony discontinued it in early 2006, but even in a fast moving technology such as robotics, it has not even come close to being equaled.  I guess it was really a device that was  way ahead of its time. There was a lot to be remembered in the rather short life of the AIBO and this note is a summary of what I think are some of the more memorable achievements.

What is an AIBO

The AIBO is a small robot that is autonomous and is supposed to look like a dog and have some behaviors of a dog. It was made by SONY Corporation starting in 1999 and with three major revisions ended in 2006. About 150,000 AIBOs were sold.

It was not a toy at least in the child sense as it was expensive and somewhat delicate  to be knocked around by a kid, But, it had a lot of child-like behaviors and was very appealing to kids. Kids usually found them slow and boring after a few weeks so in my mind, that market never really got going.

The real market was in adults. These things are cute, interesting and due to some very very clever programming they can keep adults entertained for hours, weeks and even years.

Technically the AIBO is a four-legged robot having three servos per leg, four in the head and control of the tail, mouth and ears for a total of 20 control points. It has contact sensors on the head, back, chin and feet, two IR ranging systems in the head and chest. A TV quality video camera, stereo microphones and speakers. Later models have WiFi. A single computer runs this with software stored on a flash card (Sony stick of course). All this is powered by a LiIon battery which gives the dog a 2 hour active floor life. Later models will seek and attach to their charging stations when the battery is low, getup and roam around after it is charged.

What makes it run?

But the hardware is not the real story here. It is in the software. The AIBO comes with the ability to recognize about 100 commands. It will indicate that it recognized what you said by flipping it ears. But Sony in its cunningness didn’t want just a automon that would do every command so the AIBO is setup to obey about one-third of the time. The models that can talk (with a vocabulary of 0ver 1000 phrases) will often make some remark about what you requested, most of them somewhat insolent. In general the AIBO will do what it wants to do, more or less inspite of what you requested. Now the reactions are not uniform or even repeatable and this leads to the very real fact that each AIBO has a unique personality.

Some of the antics that an AIBO can do is to dance to music it hears, do a wide number of “canned” dances supplying its own music, tricks with its toys, a ball and a bone, celebrate birthdays and recognize it owners voice and face, talk to other AIBOs, tell date and time, and perform exploratory searches for who knows what and other autonomous behaviors. More than one AIBO will play together, but not too well as this was not a big priority in the programming (these things are expensive and Sony didn’t think too many folk would have more than one…although today most everyone that has one has more than one). They also wave a “watchdog” modewhere they will photograph and sound record any motion in their view. You can see a lot of burglar knees this way. They also can autonomously blog with pictures and activities of the day.

AIBOs can also be programmed by codes available free. This leads to a lot of antics that are very interesting and unique to the AIBO. See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L-mpZx2FPU

In this movie, the AIBOs are each programmed to start a routine with tones that are part of the music introduction. This dance is a cute rendition of the dance, “TimeWarp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show produced by TeamDax of http://www.good-aibo.co.uk/forum/

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral-downloads/legged/movies/index.html#2004USOpen

This is a lot of movies of the four-legged soccer games that were popular when the AIBOs were available. The rules do not allow any hardware modifications to the dogs, just software. They are playing all on their own other than the starting command. The soccer software had developed to about the point where the individual dogs could identify a team member and pass the ball to them. I don’t think any of the videos depict this. They do show the various strategies and team efforts to defend and attack with decisions made by the individual dogs. If you are wondering why they are all running around on their front elbows it was found that it was faster and more stable than using the entire front leg.