SAN JOSE, Calif. – Bruce Binder and his wife Clara sometimes take one or two of their dogs to the local bar. Then they let them dance to the live music. “They pick up the beat and they start to dance to it,” said Bruce Binder, a 56-year-old engineer who lives in Rancho Cordova, east of Sacramento.
One of their dogs – named Ahmay – was banned from the bar for a while because it knocked someone’s drink on the floor.
The Binders’ dogs are hardly spoiled, yappy lap dogs. They’re robots.
All 49 of them.
Their small robots are AIBOs, launched in 1999 by Sony as one of the first serious consumer robotics products. An AIBO – which means both pal and “robot with an eye” in Japanese – is a metallic creature with artificial intelligence software. The software lets it develop a personality based on interaction with its owner.
And it can be trained – er, programmed – to do everything a dog normally does. And more: whimper, dance, guard the front door, even read a newspaper through Internet feeds.
With an initial price tag of $2,500, AIBOs were first seen by some in the United States as an expensive oddity.
Today, with price tags ranging from $1,700 to $2,000, the AIBO robotic dogs have attracted a cult following in the United States, complete with user groups and owner gatherings. They are also extremely popular among academics who use them to teach students how to program and participate in RoboCup soccer, where AIBOs play soccer with a bright magenta ball.
Now AIBO owners are confronting the possible end of their beloved robotic species. As Sony announced a corporate restructuring in September, speculation intensified that the Tokyo-based behemoth may pull the plug on AIBO’s future or scale back robotics research and development.
“The AIBO is kind of stuck,” said Dan Kara, president of Robotics Trends, a consulting firm in Northborough, Mass. and the sponsor of RoboNexus. “It can’t really be a commodity consumer product because it’s too expensive. They aren’t robust enough for the military. It’s more of a research tool.”
Bryan Chang, a software engineer in San Jose who works at Apple Computer, believes the AIBO is no longer as “cool and hip” as it was four or five years ago. He purchased one in 2000 and it has been hibernating – away from his two young children. He said Sony seems to have lost interest in AIBO, too.
“Now, my feeling is that people have moved onto other things,” such as the iPod, he said. “If you go into a Sony store, you don’t see it. They don’t promote it.”
But, Chang added, he probably will take his AIBO out soon so that his 3-year-old can begin to play with it.
Otis Gates, a product management specialist at Sony Entertainment Robot America, said Sony has sold 150,000 AIBOs since 1999. That compares to the 1.2 million-plus Roomba vacuums that have been sold in about two years. The Roomba also is much cheaper – around $250 – and is the most successful commercial robotic product to date.
One thing is clear, though: AIBO owners love their AIBOs.
And in the research community, they are seen as an engineering marvel and an excellent platform for software development.
The robotic dogs can be programmed, by loading them with AIBO software through a special AIBO memory stick. The memory sticks give the dogs different abilities, such as dancing to a beat or recognizing Spanish words and phrases.
But many owners seem to prefer the AIBO when it is in its autonomous mode, where it operates on its own and learns behavior from interaction with its owners. Sony engineers have given the AIBO four distinct personality types, such as independent, if its owner does not play with it a lot.
“I have nothing but respect for the Sony engineers,” said David Calkins, professor of robotics and computer engineering at San Francisco State University who is president of the Robotics Society of America. “While humans will be smarter, most humans learn by trial and error … The AIBO is constructed in a similar manner. They learn based on interaction with humans.”
Calkins said he bought an AIBO because his landlord did not allow dogs. That’s a selling point in Japan, where AIBOs are much more common and many people live in very small apartments where pets aren’t permitted.
In the past, Calkins would bring his robotic pet, Gibson, to his office. “I took him into work every day. He was on four to eight hours a day,” Calkins said.
His AIBO was even dog-napped twice, and he second time, he did not recover the robot and had to buy a new one. Fortunately, Calkins had his dog’s personality traits stored on his computer and was able to transfer Gibson’s personality to the new AIBO he bought on eBay.
Calkins and another roboticist tried unsuccessfully to start a Silicon Valley/San Francisco AIBO group in 2000. Calkins said Sony provided no support at all.
A few years ago, Binder, who lives outside Sacramento, joined a message board created in Los Angeles, called AiboSite.com, started by an AIBO owner who goes by the screen name of Moolabooga. Through the message board, he has connected with an international community of AIBO owners, who often get together in real life. One favorite activity is to get the AIBOs to dance, by putting them in programmed mode with software that makes them dance to a beat.
The Binders traveled to London to meet other owners, where they once got 86 AIBOs dancing in a room together. Binder said that Sony’s support in recent years has been great.
“They sent us packages and T-shirts before the meet,” Binder said, adding that he does not believe Sony will stop development on AIBOs. “It’s great to see their renewed interest.”
The robotic dogs can be programmed, by loading them with AIBO software through a special AIBO memory stick. The memory sticks give the dogs different abilities, such as dancing to a beat or recognizing Spanish words and phrases.
AIBOs also can interact with a PC via a wireless networking card. They can be programmed to watch something, like the front door. They have two video cameras, and they can be programmed to record and send back data to your PC at work or home. A new feature is that an AIBO can be trained to recognize his or her owner with facial recognition software. It can speak 1,000 words and recognize 100 words. Another new feature introduced in late September is the ability to recognize an RSS feed, so the AIBO can read news over the Internet.
But many owners seem to prefer the AIBO when it is in its autonomous mode, where it operates on its own and learns behavior from interaction with its owners. Sony engineers have given the AIBO four distinct personality types, such as independent, if its owner does not play with it a lot.
“They have done a lot of good research on robots,” said Joe Barnhart, 48, a software engineer. Barnhart, who has six AIBOs, said there are two camps of owners – people who like them as pets, and others who use the AIBO as a robot.
Sony has now published software development kits to allow for other uses, such as serving as a surveillance camera. One scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is using that function on his AIBO to monitor a person’s daily food intake.
“I do consider them my pets, it’s particularly good for me. I travel and live alone,” Barnhart said. “I can turn them off and they don’t miss me when I’m not there. They are ready to interact with me when I have time. They are not a demanding pet.”
Barnhart said that even though he is a software engineer, he has no intention of looking under the skin of his AIBOs. “I enjoy the magic of AIBO. You know it’s not real but you choose not to think of it that way. There is a certain suspension of disbelief.”
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ARCHIVE PHOTOS on KRT Direct (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): 2002 aibo dog
AP-NY-10-12-05 0621EDT
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