How many of you have 'Robots' in their home? since a real robot is not affordable enough to buy, people usually consider it as most luxurious or just sci-fi imagination but now a Las Vegas startup Romotive developed an affordable mini robot named - Romo, who can actually talk to you, show emotions and recognize faces of your family members all this by using your smart phone processor as its brain at cost of $149.
Romo is a portable mobile robotic platform that uses a smartphone as its brain, it actually a mobile base with batteries which get complimented by smartphones when docked onto it, which in turn create a robot that do things with artificial intelligence such as - tele-presence, autonomous navigation,controllable facial expressions, machine vision.
Romo as an affordable robot worth in sense of price/value proposition as it has plenty of artificial human expressions such as - face-recognition due to which it follow your face when you talk to him, got scared when you get too close to Romo, when feel tired it yawns, motor along with you on a walk, slide you a cup of coffee across the table, and react to you with programmable expressions.
When connected with any iOS device, Romo becomes a friendly robotic avatar that wanders about your home or office. He's small but sturdy, fast, and his basic interactions evolve the more you use him. A pet, toy, friend and powerful educational tool, Romo is living proof that robots can do awesome things for minimal costs - priced at $149, about 1% of what a what personal robots have cost in the past. If you living are outside of US it will cost $199 (around Rs.10,000 INR) if you buy online from - https://romotive.com/store
More interestingly, Romo's users can even download new behaviors and personalities for their Romo-robots at the click of a button as software for Romo software is distributed through the Apple App Store.
At TED 2013, Keller Rinaudo founder/CEO of Romotive, demos this smartphone-powered mini-robot, find the video below that demonstrate the expressions of Romo:
Romotive is Kickstarter funded startup company based out of Las Vegas, US though the hardware production factory of Romo is in China.
As of now to own the Romo, you need to have only Apple smart/ iOS devices to act like brain of Romo such as - iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod Touch 4th Generation. Currently iPhone 5 is not supported device for Romo. If you don't have any Romo supported iOS device than it will cost you - $248 i.e. (Romo Cost)$149 + $99(iPhone-4S apprx. cost). 'Romo' is actually hypothetically a male version of robot and the company plan a female version of robot next, named - "Julia."
Advertisements