Unless you've got US$2,500 to drop on total frivolity, you probably haven't slapped down holiday plastic for Sony's millennial dog: Aibo, the intelligent pet that's garnering raves simply for being so dog-like.
But in 10 or 15 years, robotic descendants of this year's digital Rover may cruise your floors to great utility, no paper-training required. Sit back and relax as your iBot adjusts the air temperature, puts you on a video call to your cousin, vacuums the house, monitors appliances, or takes you on a remote-controlled tour of a far-away museum.
That is the brave, if vague, new world envisioned by robot enthusiasts, who see in Aibo's paw prints the future of the personal robot industry.
"Right now, personal robotics is at the same stage personal computing was in the mid-70s, when you had a band of enthusiastic novices who would be taking these 8-bit computers and hacking together all kinds of things" said robot-builder and kit manufacturer Craig Maynard. "They were throwing together digital logic in new and exciting ways, and now we've got people doing the same types of things with robotics."
Maynard and others see a burgeoning industry among hobbyists as the inevitable 21st century trend that will graft the robot onto the already-swinging PC and Internet era.
Robotists credit consumer electronics hits like the VCR and camcorder for development of the technologies that are ushering in a wave of new and cheaper "micro-mechanics." The products depend on the ever-advancing refinements of what are essentially robotic technologies.
"If you look at a camcorder or VCR, the robotics inside one of these things is amazing -- the different kinds of sensors and transducers inside, measuring tension, light levels, magnetic disturbances on the tape, Maynard said. "Then you bring in the number of microprocessors that work to control all the manipulating arms and pulleys -- there's a lot of stuff going on inside one of those things."
A singular technology propelling build-your-own robots is the five-year-old technology of the "BASIC stamp," a kind of all-in-one processor-memory component that allowed PC-like programming of robotic controllers in the familiar BASIC computer language. One company manufacturing BASIC stamps is Parallax Inc.
Hobbyists have eagerly employed the BASIC stamp to customize their increasingly sophisticated creations.
Maynard said the cheaper, but more sophisticated, hardware show we are on the cusp of the robot age. Another sign is the exploding number of robot societies forming all over the world.
"It's a harbinger," Maynard said. "It shows you that the society is ready for robotics."
At the business end, the next paradigm will ignite with a hit commercial product. Enter Aibo, a name whose first two letters stand for artificial intelligence.
Sony has sold over 10,000 Aibos, according to Sony marketer Yosh Kambev.
Aibo is essentially Sony's more-sophisticated answer to the "smart"-pet trend set off by toys like Furby. Sony has refined things a bit since last year's debut of that juvenile, but still-impressive, creation.
Aibo can respond to voice commands to sit, stand, or lie down, it can learn from experience and express "emotions," such as anger and sadness, Kambev said. In its autonomous mode, Aibo can act on preprogrammed "impulses" to play, seek attention from its owner, or sleep.
"[Aibo] is Furby on steroids and it's pioneering," said Mark Medonis of Beaverton, Oregon. Medonis has been building robots as a hobby and for a living for eight years and this year his company, Medonis Engineering began to sell some of the technologies he developed for his hobby robots. "It's the first robot that has extensively used motors and sensors to that level."
Sony makes no bones about its enthusiasm for Aibo's technology.
"The biggest innovation is the robotics. That part is the most impressive," said Kambev. "Usually, robotics technology is used for factory work. This is the first example of robotics technology for the home. It has an artificial life program, learning capability, maturation capability. That's the difference between Aibo and Furby."
How far can this trajectory of cheaper, smarter, smaller robotics go? For a glimpse at the future, Craig Maynard points to the robot world's pièce de résistance: the Honda walking robot.
He has seen the robot in action and is amazed by the 6-foot-tall humanoid that acts "like [a] guy in space suit," Maynard said. "He can walk across the room, up stairs ... if you push they'll catch their balance. They can move, turn, and interact just like you and I can."
Maynard manufactures and sells (worldwide and at a brisk pace, he reports) "cybugs, robotic insects designed to behave and interact with each other like the real thing.
To what end, all this droidal replication of human functions? Good question. Even the experts don't pretend to know what the future holds.
As Maynard put it, "You've got to imagine stuff we haven't seen before."
Maybe they'll take care of simple security tasks: adjust the air temperature, monitor the furnace for problems, watch for prowlers, he suggested. They might bring more real-world dimensions to computer games, and entertainment value. "Games could come out of computer and start interacting with people again -- versus the computer, which sits there like a big window," noted Maynard.
Rather than having to expensively retrofit every home's electrical, plumbing, and heating infrastructure to make them smart, the robot could be the mobile brain, learning to adapt to the controls, knobs, and systems the house already has. "Instead of making the house match the computer, I make the computer match the house."
He imagines a personal robot with a fleet of PC-like "peripherals": arms, legs, and other extensions to accommodate the surrounding physical world's varying interface requirements, such as different doorknobs, switches, and appliances.
Tapped into the Internet, robots could become a consumer telepresence, standing in for people in distant places. For example, a camera-enabled robot in the Louvre could be manipulated over the Net by a user in New York who wants to view the museum's collections from afar.
"What this thing could do, how you could interact with it, I don't know, exactly. It's going to take some thinkers to figure out what people might want to do with these things."
But technologically and commercially, enthusiasts are sure the industry is approaching critical mass. "Everything's all coming together, Maynard said. "It's just waiting for some young Steve Wozniak who's gonna find its little niche."
