Sony’s Next Robot
On Tuesday I went to a lecture by the Masahiro Fujita, the Principal Scientist and System Architect at Digital Creatures Laboratory, Sony Corporation. They’re the group that made the AIBO. He was talking about what looks to be the successor to the AIBO, the SDR-4. The motion, particularly the balance and types of navigation it could handle, was impressive. Check out some videos here, here (watch the volume levels on this one - it’s loud, but several SD4s are singing and dancing), and a few good ones here. Here’s an article from PCWorld about the SD4, and a feature list from Sony. Fujita was also encouraging students to download the SDK for controlling their robots - I guess this has been quite a source of innovation for them.
I also got to see some footage of last year’s robotic soccer championships, called RoboCup, where teams of autonomous robots, including AIBOs, play soccer on a very small field. It was surprisingly thrilling to watch. The American Open 2003 is going to be at Carnegie Mellon in early May. Didn’t think I’d be saying this, but I’ll be going…