Aibo, Your electronic pal

Those of you who know me know that I love gad­gets. I admit that I was among the peo­ple that dili­gently waited in line to get a Tam­agochi and I did con­sider get­ting a Furby before decid­ing that I would wait for the next gen­er­a­tion. So when Sony intro­duced AIBO, an elec­tronic pet, I have to admit that I was ready to pull out my credit card. How­ever, at $2500 per unit, it may be a lit­tle pricey.

So what does AIBO do, you’re won­der­ing. Well, think of a pet that doesn’t require any upkeep (no need to worry about walk­ing them out, feed­ing them or clean­ing up after them).

That’s essen­tially what AIBO is. But, more to the point, AIBO is also the first cute robot com­pan­ion to hit the mar­ket and may be the father of a new trend in robotics.

For the techies among us, AIBO is a 64-bit, 100-MHz RISC proces­sor run­ning Sony’s pro­pri­etary Ape­rios oper­at­ing sys­tem, 18 motors, a gyro­scope to keep it sta­ble, diode eyes for detect­ing color and dis­tance, and a remov­able Sony Mem­ory Stick (which, I can’t fig­ure out why, goes under his tail). The unit can run for about an hour and a half on a recharge­able bat­tery (how­ever, it will not move back to its bay to recharge itself), under­stands basic sound com­mands (although you have to use a spe­cial device to com­mu­ni­cate with it) and has very basic learn­ing mech­a­nisms that allow it to evolve and develop a mini-personality.

How­ever, a text descrip­tion does not do it jus­tice: the genius of Sony is that it has cre­ated a cute robot and, while it is not as furry or talk­a­tive as a Furby, it does go a long way toward mak­ing itself likable.

It’s pre­pro­grammed antics also do help, as does the fact that it seems to move like a dog. At the cur­rent time, there are only about 5000 AIBOs out there in the world and they’ve all been sold. How­ever, keep an eye on this lit­tle robot: it just may be the first of many…