Toys

These are some robotic pets I developed while working for Bandai in Tokyo. You can read about the AI developed for them at my AI page. Here's me, a long time ago, with some of the robots we made. These ran my AI and could interact with each other and humans in a number of interesting ways.

News! Bandai has finally released a toy very much like what we were working on! It's called Wonderborg.

These robots used either legs or wheels to get around. They had infrared tranceivers (like that in a TV remote control) so they could find each other and coordinate their behaviours. They also had two microphones so they could localize sound and track the source, and they could also recognize their own name. Using the infrared sensor they could follow heat sources like humans, and when several of them were placed together they would find each other and have "conversations", coordinate dance moves, or play tag with each other, depending on their mood.

Some robotic dinosaur pets. These had the same behaviours as described for the pets above. The Triceratops actually got built. It was fun to play with. Unfortunately, I can't find my photos of the robots!

This diagram below shows some alternative physical layouts for the pet's mechanics. You can see the infrared transmitter on the very top of all of the units and infrared sensors at the front. The microphones are the small boxes just behind the infared sensors. The large flat block beneath the sensors is the 68xx series integrated microcontroller that ran these things. Underneath that are the two nicad batteries, and packed below that are the two motors for driving the wheels or legs. The tiny wheel on some of the units is a caster. The prototype we built was much larger than these (about 15 cm long) and ran on an 80286 based microcontroller board.

The pets were intended to be about 6cm (2 inches) long not including the tail. Ultimately none of the pets were released as designed as they would have ended up retailing for around 6000 yen (US$60) using the technology available at the time. Instead, the various subsystems (voice recognition, IR transceiver, tilt sensor, AI, etc.) found their way into plush toys that could recognize their name, golf controllers for video games, video games, and many other inexpensive toys. The label at the bottom reads "SyntelliPet Mark II". Mark I was the larger, more expensive prototype Triceratops.