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At the time of writing this, they are at around 400k USD!
My first reaction was a feeling of general malaise and nausea watching the campaign video, which resembled some cookie cutter Nao cum Jibo indoctrinating manipulation of the hapless proletariat. The campaign page was a perfect copy of other successful Indiegogo/Kickstrter monstrosities.
Video production can bridge between consumer groups. The existing consumer group of techies that have been buying and building similar humanoid robots for 10 years are not likely to appreciate such a video insinuating that the robot does things it obviously can not do. However, the Indiegogo supporters community who buy "early access" gadgets are certainly showing their appreciation of the video production and its many promisses.
The campaign's page and video make the following Claims. Lets see what they really mean:
Tutor and interpreter - ie: voice to text -> google translate
Nurse - ie: google calendar event
Housekeeper - "provides reminders for the whole family and helps when cooking and repairing things" - ie: use Android google calendar + google search
Personal Assistant - "make calls, read voicemail, sms, send fax" (Android in-built functions)
Home Guard - "control lights, locks, alarms and act as remote monitor" - ie: install your faviourite Android apps
Weatherman - Android built-in functions
Entertainmer - "personal photographer, videographer, DJ, dancer and singer" - that has good potential. lets see if/how they execute
Storyteller - text to voice (Android apps built in)
Yogi - 20DOF humanoid can do some contortion.. especially if you manually place him in a given position
Putting an Android inside a well shelled humanoid robot is a great way to leveraging Android apps.
This robot has potential of being entertaining to the target audience for a some time if some software development efforts are put in place such as automatically animating the movements to the sound without repeating the same motion too often.
alpha2a.jpg
Their less polished website ubtrobot.com has some good old Chinengilsh outlandish statements "AlpMax This app contain huge amounts of knowledge about medical and health.story which your kid will like."
and "StoryTeller Alpha2 knew all the good story which your kid will like. This app is a good bed time partner." However, when looking at the specs, this robot has some impressive features including as a cellphone CPU, 8mp camera and 20 DOF. The robot programming SDK is in Java and seems to let you create an app that runs on the Android 4.4 OS.
At $500 or even $600 it is not a bad deal. -- Assuming the servos actually can make the robot walk and last more than say 30 hours. It is not clear how many of the 20kg-cm servos are in the robot. They are also selling 20kg-cm servos for $50 on their own or for $200 if purchased together with the robot (some people actually bought that option
).alpha2b.jpg
The company has made a previous version called Alpha 1 which didnt seem to have the camera and the general NAO look.
alpha1b.jpg
alpha1a.jpg
Statistics: Posted by limor — Fri Nov 13, 2015 9:59 pm
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