SONY AIBO Robot Dog
At Last, a Dog That Barks, Wags
Its Tail and Never Has to Go Out
Wall Street Journal
May 12, 1999
by Peter Landers
TOKYO -- As products go, Sony
Corp.'s latest gadget is (almost) a real dog.
Meet "AIBO," a robot pet unveiled here Tuesday. The $2,500 dog-shaped
robot, with floppy microphone ears and a color camera for eyes, has
artificial-intelligence software so that it can adapt, Sony says, to its
owner's praise and scolding.
AIBO's "main need is to communicate with humans," says Ai Kato of Sony's
Entertainment Robot Business Incubation Department. The robot tries to
guess what its owner likes. "You have to pat it gently and get it in a good
mood," she says. A tactical sensor on its head will register your touch.
AIBO can express its own emotions by wagging its tail up, down and
sideways.
Sony plans to sell 3,000 of the robots in Japan and 2,000 in the U.S.
starting June 1 as part of a test-marketing campaign. They're the result of
a six-year quest by Sony for a home-entertainment robot, says Toshitada
Doi, head of the Sony Digital Creatures Laboratory. The company has been
looking for hit products at a time when many of its markets have
matured.
But this dog, as it now stands -- or crouches -- isn't quite ready to
replace Fido. While it can bark and "sing" robotic melodies, AIBO doesn't
have voice-recognition software, so it can't respond when its name is
called. It does have "open architecture," Mr. Doi says, so it could be
easily upgraded once such software is available.
Also, AIBO isn't always so virtually quick on the uptake. At an
introductory press conference, it failed at first to play with a very real
ball offered by a Sony executive. It did, however, wave a paw at
photographers.
is hardly the first company to think of breeding virtual pets.
Tamagotchis and Furbys caused consumer frenzies in the U.S. when they first
appeared. And back in Silicon Valley's stone age -- the late 1980s -- Atari
Corp. founder Nolan Bushnell dreamed up an interactive virtual pet that
never caught on.
But AIBO has the movement ability of a sophisticated robot. It can
stand up straight after being knocked on its side and detect edges so it
won't walk off the end of a table. It can also rotate its rear legs in
double-jointed ways that Rover wouldn't dream of.
Sony says AIBO's future will depend on reaction to the test campaign.
Because people, unlike AIBO, do not have green and red light-emitting
diodes to express happiness and anger, the company says it will study calls
to its service center and comments on Internet chat sites.
Copyright © 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc
This Cute Little Pet Is a Robot
Business Week
24 May 1999
And Sony is betting robotic pets could soon be as hot as video games Sony Corp.'s leading computer engineer, is obsessed with robots. Not the legless slaves that toil in Japan's car and VCR factories, but autonomous creatures that can navigate their environment and respond to changes. Doi's small, third-floor lab is a breeding ground for robotic pups taking their first wobbly steps, chasing balls, and barking for attention. ''We're getting ready for the age of digital creatures,'' says Doi.
The age has already arrived. On May 11, Sony's Digital Creatures Laboratory officially introduced what is almost certainly the world's most sophisticated entertainment robot. Priced at $2,000, it's called AIBO, a Japanese word for ''companion'' that's also short for Artificial Intelligence Robot. And yes, AIBO is a robotic dog. This puppy is not ready to bring you your slippers, but in sheer brain power, he puts your basic Furby to shame.
Sony SNE hopes AIBO is just the first in a whole menagerie of artificial dogs, cats, monkeys, and creatures yet to be imagined. Doi thinks robopets could become a new pillar of Sony's $40 billion consumer electronics business. The pets will start out with modest capabilities (table). Indeed, AIBO is just smart enough not to fall off the edge of a table. But within a few years, such companions could be running errands, helping with household chores, and assisting the handicapped.
Long before such smart robots march into homes, simple pets will be sopping up plenty of affection. The day after Sony's announcement, its Tokyo call center was flooded with more than 1,000 customers eager to order artificial pets. But will Sony be the one to set the standards for entertainment robots? Competition is already intense. In March, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. MC showed a prototype of a talking robotic cat with camera sensors for eyes, designed as a companion for Japan's quickly growing elderly population. Honda Motor Co. HMD is pushing the ''mechatronic'' envelope with humanoid robots that can climb stairs. And in the U.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology robotics maven Rodney A. Brooks runs a company called IS Robotics, whose machines were the prototypes for the Rover Sojourner that explored Mars.
Still, Sony has formidable advantages. In addition to the world's most recognized brand, the company has had a skunk works on robotics since 1994. They've road-tested early prototypes at international competitions, collaborating with the likes of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the University of Paris, and Japan's Osaka University.
TOUGH TASKS. The outlines of the business of the future began to take shape in 1993, when Doi heard about a competitor's project to develop a housecleaning robot. ''I thought it was a terrible idea,'' he recalls. ''The level of technology hadn't reached the point where it could handle such complex tasks.'' Yet the subject fascinated him, and for the next several months he brooded over the problems of the autonomous robot. His revelation, later that year, was that robots don't have to be chore-masters, which need a high degree of accuracy.
Not so toys. As head of a Sony product development lab in 1994, Doi enlisted Masahiro Fujita, an artificial-intelligence expert, to configure a robot with sensors. Fujita initially emulated the famous Genghis, a six-legged artificial insect developed in the late 1980s by MIT's Brooks. After foraging for parts in Tokyu Hands, a hobby-goods emporium in Tokyo, Fujita took just two weeks to crank out a six-legged crawler. Doi formed a development team, and over the next five years ran through six separate prototypes.
Doi, Fujita, and fellow engineer Koji Kageyama quickly surmised that robotic dogs or cats would hold greater appeal than anything resembling a cockroach. But the challenges of making a four-legged creature walk proved far greater than any of them had imagined. ''We couldn't get the right balance between the weight of the robot and the power of the motors'' in each joint, explains Fujita. A third and fourth prototype reduced the robot's weight and size, but a walking robot continued to elude them.
None of this fazed the individualistic Doi, a jazz musician who has recently taken up the quena, a South American flute that he plays at meditation gatherings. His message to his engineers: Just hang tough. A breakthrough came in 1996, when Fujita's team decided to use magnesium alloy instead of steel for the metal molding. The weight reduction allowed the robot to walk.
Until this time, Doi and his engineers had relied on Brooks's published architecture in designing the artificial intelligence of their robots. Doi, however, wanted his robots to move beyond Brooks. His core concept was a set of guidelines called the ''Open-R'' architecture--which he now calls the ''masterpiece'' of the entire development project. It relies on reusable chunks of software code known as objects, which minimize the need for programming individual movements or responses. Best of all, it's ''open,'' meaning that it's designed to encourage a global community of robot specialists and programmers to add capability.
Yet Doi needed a bigger budget. In mid-1997, he approached Sony's top executives and got an enthusiastic response from President Nobuyuki Idei, who had already coined Sony's rallying cry: ''Digital dream kids.'' Idei was on the prowl for a project he could call his own. Says Doi: ''The entertainment robot was right on target.'' At the same time, Doi was growing increasingly concerned about his robot's appearance. He begged Sony's famed product designers to come up with the next Mickey Mouse. They failed him, but his friend, cartoon artist Hajime Sorayama, hit the visual spot with AIBO.
The last weeks before the May launch date were chaotic. The development group, which had grown to two dozen members, raced to iron out software glitches that were still plaguing the seventh prototype, on which AIBO is based. They worked overnight, through weekends, and--despite the protests of the personnel office--during part of the Golden Week holiday in early May.
Now, with AIBO officially launched, Sony wants to apply the lessons it learned from its hugely successful PlayStation video-game business. Lesson No. 1: Don't try to do everything in-house. Just as Sony early on lured hundreds of game developers to help with the PlayStation, Doi is inviting developers to create new programs for AIBO. How about a doggie that plays Jimi Hendrix tunes? ''A developer could do that,'' says one Sony engineer. ''AIBO already sings songs.''
Sony also plans to leverage the power of the Internet. Rather than going through its usual distribution channels, Sony will market AIBO solely through its Internet home page. For now, it has allotted 2,000 units for U.S. customers and 3,000 for Japan. A modest start. But if Sony has its way, the planet will soon be swarming with new critters.
Copyright 1999, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.
A Chat With Sony's Dr. Doolittle
Business Week
26 July 1999
pages 22B to22F
portions reproduced below
Question: Are you pleased with the launch of your pet robot, Aibo?
It was the most successful (new product) announcement that Sony has ever made. On June 1, when
we put the robot on sale on our Japanese web siet, the available 3,000 units went in less than
20 minutes. We prepared over 40 servers but they were still overwhelmed. In the U.S. the average load
was much more severe because, since the site is in English, people tried to access it from around the world.
Question: Are you planning to launch a new version anytime soon?
Since htere were so many people who were unable to purchase their own Aibo, we've been asked to release
another version. This first version was limited to 5,000 units, and we won't amke anymore. Now, we're planning to
release another one. We're consulting the customres directly and building a new business model in the process.
But I don't know how long it will take for us to begin.
Question: What else do you see in the world of artificial intelligence?
People from the Computer Science Laboratory are woking on (crature-like) search agents for a network.
All these are very biological and autonomous. In the real world, we'll find lots of autonomous robots, and in the
cyberworld we'll find a lot of agents who will communicate among themselves. My message to the world is that the
21st century will be the age of digitial creatures. The robots could be pets, housecleaners, an artificial wife or husband or almost anything else. The cybeworld will be filled with agents and cyberpets. There will also be the bad creatures, such as the viruses. But we can't avoid them. In the future, the network itself will be huge digital creature. We will carefully design it so that it will help human beings, not harm them, for efficiency or entertainment. I'm very sure we're clever enough to do this.
