Tried out the simulator and was surprised to find that the movement keys are ZQSD; then realized that's the equivalent of WASD on an AZERTY keyboard. Checked and sure enough, Pollen Robotics is a French company.
They may want to at least add a preference for keyboard layout, pretty sure that QWERTY and QWERTZ are much more common worldwide than AZERTY.
As a French guy who grew up playing CS 1.6 on an AZERTY keyboard, I have a feeling that the people who made this website are either a generation above or below Millenials.
Because it doesn't make sense: you don't make a website in English, with prices in USD... while expecting users to have an AZERTY keyboard.
That's a completely different class of robot. The Beni robot is just a toy, it's just connect the app and drive it around, record videos and do some fancy tricks like flips. It is not meant to be a platform you program yourself.
The Microduck is meant to be a hacker toy. Train it yourself, write software, hack it, etc.
It depends what you're trying to get for your daughter. Is it something to get her into robotics? Then probably the Microduck is the way. If it's literally just a toy, then the Beni robot is better because that's literally all it is.
I would describe the Microduck as more of a toy than Beni. Autonomous cameraman is a real application that Beni performs out of the box. I think you'll struggle to get Microduck to do anything genuinely useful.
Boni seems more like a closed project and I'd rather have something where access isn't an afterthought as indicated on the Kickstarter.
> Right now, we simply haven't reached any conclusions regarding developer tools, documentation, or access. We haven't done the planning or the groundwork yet. Our current plan is to look into all of this after we've shipped the first batch and things settle down a bit.
MKBHD covered Beni the other day and it looks like a super super fun toy. Not sure about the educational value, but I was thinking about getting one for the kid in my life (me). https://youtu.be/mfmdXPT7nAM?t=592 (9:52)
My favorite bit from that was when he had it do a flip and the battery ejected from it's niche and it died. Also the constant suicide attempts from trying to run it on a table but that's a problem for any mobile robot and tabletop demos.
I got this for my kids https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doly/doly-more-than-a-r... earlier this year (after a much longer than expected wait on Kickstarter)...was good for a bit and had some fun but mostly gathering dust now. Occasionally will come out if friends are over.
Both are expensive e waste, companies come up every 5 years with these "house robots for kids", they're used for about 5 days, I've seen the cycle many times already
Makes sense. Unless you can disassemble/reassemble. I guess selling kits (Meccano, Technics) would be the better approach. I recall countless hours building stuff and my kids love their Magnetiles and everything that lets them build in a free-form.
As a kick-starter project is this thing actually real? My experience with kick-starter has been that the projects are almost universally faked.
I've only contributed to three kickstarters, and they all worked out well. But I think I'm more selective than most people, and generally don't jump on something until it's already been fully funded by other people.
For what it’s worth the mondo team has been posting development log videos on Reddit since before they incorporated. They raised money so they now have ads with more production value, but they came from small beginnings and I do trust their product.
Not sure many people know this - most of the robotics stuff that you see in the news is based on MujoCo (Multi-Joint dynamics with Contact) engine, that is used primarily to create simulated environments in which these robots learn the RL policies. This project is maintained by Google deepmind - https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco
Two things that I always contemplate on whether to post this: 1) this can be a phone. 2) almost all of these except Sony ones got joint geometries completely "wrong" to be cutemaxxed toys.
I'm not a Sony employee or anything, but theirs is whole next level even just sitting unpowered, compared to even some of other Japanese bots. Everyone making these cutebots should have one of any of Sony bots to study, even just as a dead kinetic sculpture.
I think this version has a certain charm to it, reminiscent of Wall-E. I think avoiding the uncanny valley is better than trying to cutemax and failing.
I've tried a few small robot kits and every single one fails the moment it reaches even moderately deep carpet. Either the size of motion doesn't clear the carpet or the motors aren't strong enough to deal with it. The living room is a small robots sand trap. Couldn't help but notice precious little carpet in any of the promo material. What's the point of a robot buddy if you cant play with it in the living room?
Not much to say, really; it controls my house in Home Assistant using an LLM, and a STT/TTS server. It acts as the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, with a trigger word and whatnot.
It's basically like giving an Alexa, Siri, or Gemini a body. It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes, things like that.
I can also turn on lights, the TV, the AC, ask about the weather, and other basic assistant stuff, ofc.
> It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes, things like that.
So basically you're using it as an AI mother in law, nice.
There is an application for Reachy that makes it so you can connect to Home Assistant, but it's broken and seems abandoned, so I forked it, fixed it, and customized it. That gets you 80% of the way. The rest is based on automations built inside Home Assistant.
Old Roombas used to come with a serial port so you could use drive the motors and use it as a robot base. Then, you stick a wireless router and a webcam on top - no raspberry pi in those days.
This actually seems awesome, just going through the video on their site made me burst out with 100 different ways in which I would tinker with it, spend time in learning different gaits, some RL or some tricks to have it jump or do a back flip
I can see some parallel between how arduino gave hobbyist a mini computer they can use in any way imaginable, I can see this kind of thing being used to solve unimaginable problems by hobbyist or RL computer scientist or heck any UG student with claude subscription
Interesting that they're using Dynamixel instead of Feetech for the servos. More expensive but better quality. I'm surprised it still comes in under $400.
Years ago I worked with developmentally disabled people, that absolutely loved animals but could never be left alone with one much less own one. This kind of product would have brought so much joy to those people.
I think it's distasteful to screen ethically questionable business practices with segments of the disabled community. If this product was being marketed towards the need of developmentally disabled individuals I feel like there would be less grounds for criticism, however meeting those needs in no way excuses outright fabrication of marketing claims aimed at the broader consumer market, and especially children.
Honestly I feel that way for the whole AI friend industry that is developing, from AI boyfriends and girlfriends to just kind of AI 'friends'. But this sort of thing is a sort of robot pet and I think the dynamics are different. Some one replacing a robot cat with a cat is not an evil thing in the way that trying to substitute human relationships are.
I agree, just don’t lie about it. You can present it as a cute little robot pet without problems. No need to say “it expresses and feels emotions like a real cat”. The AI industry has normalized lying about your products to a whole new level, that shouldn’t be acceptable
> Through communication, Moflin’s emotional state changes. Your robot companion can show joy, sadness, and happiness, reacting just like a living creature would. Moflin does not possess actual emotions like humans do. Their emotional expressions are simulated by AI. And lots of bits of the advert seems to be explain how it's not real in the QA and that everything is a simulation.
I have not used the product, but nothing strikes me as dishonest about the advertising.
i bought one about a year ago and used it for 20 days or so. Then I realised casio offered a full money back return for 30 days. And sorry little moflin your emotions were not real enough for me to want to keep you vs get $400 back.
I guess we are really debating the semantics of the sentences now like lawyers but to me the verb show is not particularly difficult to achieve or ambitious or misleading to use in this sort of product. A toy with a that has a smiley face and a frowning face is capable of showing two different emotions.
Your second one point also does not seem like a lie to me since it's claiming to emulate natural ingredient (although here I guess to be just like means to emulate perfectly).
I don't really see why any one would look at the product and it's marketing as evil. It seems to me aimed at people who can not have pets and are want to create a simulation of a soothing positive interaction with a pet. I don't see this as exploitative (apart from it's exploiting a desire that people have in the same way that virtually all products do), I can not see someone forming a relationship with this to the detriment of human interaction or exacerbate some kind of mental illness or cause addiction. It does seem a little expensive and that would be my only criticism of the product so far as I can see.
I don’t know what you are on about. Can the robot exhibit signs of the emotions described? If it can then the sentence is not a lie. If it can’t then it is a lie. Are you saying that it won’t do what the sentence says?
The sentence is not saying “it is a living creature”. It says it behaves as one. How much of that sentence is a lie obviously depends on how well the robot works.
The easiest route is probably to have it sit with its back to a Qi charger pad, with the coils in a sort of cape over the battery. Not much added weight for the coils, and quite a neat little intro project to get it to align itself and sit correctly.
I think in the future we'll have robot pets and look back in horror at how we enslaved animals out of their natural habitats and normalized (even glorified) it.
What about the animals that have been domesticated to be pets? It's arguable that their native habitat is the home at this point. Although, I do hope we stop capturing the animals which aren't domesticated (most "exotic" pets).
I agree with the horror of pulling animals out of their natural habitat, but if you are using this as a blanket statement towards all living animals then you should read up on the history of the domestication of wolves (dogs). It was born of a beneficial relationship to both humans and wolves and i personally find my relationship with my dogs to be extremely fulfilling and i believe my dogs do as well.
I have no interest in a relationship with a robot.
I know the history. We bred them to be our pets and normalized this relationship. Your pet might even love his life. But we can do the same with robot AIs, and it will be a better relationship. Your robot can talk to you. It can call 911 if you’re in trouble instead of just barking.
I'd argue that emotional co-regulation is born out of biological origins. Unless we are making synth, it would be a long time to match the relationship with a living creature.
> I have no interest in a relationship with a robot.
I think I could, if it meant I could keep the experience of having a pet.
I've had cats going back to my twenties. I dearly love my fifteen y/o cat. She's my last cat, though. As I approach fifty I've grown tired of hefting bags of litter and food, stooping to clean up after her, taking her to the vet, and administering her medication.
When she's finally dead (which is hopefully not for a good long time) I'm not going to get another. This makes me really sad. I'll miss having a cat around. As I age, though, I don't want the encumbrance of taking care of a pet, nor do I want to cause hardship to family if I suddenly become unable to care for a pet (dying, being hospitalized, living arrangement changes and owning a pet isn't allowed, etc).
If there was a robot alternative I'd jump on it. I think my brain would adjust fine to a convincingly-executed robotic cat. Our brains instinctively ascribe agency to objects moving in non-inertial frames, for example. Think about all the people who name their Roomba, install googly eyes on it, etc. People easily accept inanimate objects that behave like living things, to the point of developing feelings for them.
When my cat is gone I hope to get the opportunity to choose a "relationship" with a convincing robotic cat versus not having one at all.
I wouldn't expect everyone to feel this way. I certainly don't want to legislate away pet ownership.
I bet that, if good robotic pets become available, we'll see a significant number of people favoring them over living pets for convenience, long-term cost, freedom from anxiety about the pet's health and eventual death, and the opportunity for companionship in living arrangements where pets aren't allowed.
I've said, for years, that I think there's hundreds of billions of dollars for the company who can make really good robotic pets. If somebody can get the "soft robotics" down and build / train good animal behavior models I think they'll be able to print money.
Interesting how all of the replies so far to your comment assume we’d just release the existing animals into the wild instead of just not breeding more.
As one might guess, the "just" there is doing a lot of work.
Common pets reproduce just fine without our intervention - in practice it requires costly maintenance programs just to keep their population under control (not to mention the massive and ongoing eugenics program required to produce only the desirable breeds/attributes).
If your neighbourhood isn't overrun with stray cats and dogs, that's because someone is funding a spay/neuter program, and someone is funding animal control to round up (and ultimately euthanise) the rest.
All animal husbandry systems have to be maintained via regular culling, and "eliminating" pets would require orders of magnitude more killing
I always assumed the "enslaved animal-free" future would be something that came on gradually, likely motivated by economics (i.e. lab-grown meat becoming cheaper and higher quality than farmed, robotic pets being cheaper and more "trouble-free", etc).
I never felt like anybody seriously thought we'd release domestic animals into the wild to fend for themselves-- that's ludicrous.
> look back in horror at how we enslaved animals out of their natural habitats
Somehow, vegan-inclined folks never seem to factor in the mass-genocide of domestic breeds that is necessary to achieve their particular utopia. We're talking 1.5 billion pets, 5 billion livestock, and 28 billion poultry - none of which are remotely able to survive on their own in the wild.
I detest the vegan movement. I'm not an animal lover. Pets are unsanitary nuisances. Robots are better. We don't need to commit a genocide against domestic pets for the transition. Just breed less.
This looks really cool! The cuteness of the demo alone makes me want one. Ideally I would also love for it to have a real use case in my home but right now I really cant think of one.
I genuinely could not tell if this was a parody/satire or not, I think because the aesthetic reminds me of how a product like this would be presented in a horror movie or something
The biggest idea of this device seems to be that people would be able to write software to it, so this seems very likely to be in the domain of achievable things, because it has a camera and LIDAR.
Don't believe that all pet animals are having a great life.
Many people with a dog don't get that as a pack animal it's cruel to leave it alone indoors all day, they overfeed them and keep them alive well beyond the stage where some hip/back/joint pain issues would keep it in constant pain. Cats are the opposite, people get them "a companion" so it doesn't feel "alone", yet in reality, in addition to also being way overfed, there is now constant warfare in the house cause cats (that are not directly blood related) actually hate each other, another word for being territorial. "Oh look how cute they are playing with each other, chasing through the house!" Yeah no, it's Hunger Games day in day out. Other species don't fare better, from turtles living in their own s*it to birds who never can fly. We are very cruel to our pets, often too ignorant to notice, with exceptions being much too rare.
Naw bro. These pets are domesticated. They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild.
Also the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all and which is what will happen if you replace it with AI. You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.
> They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild.
Ok? What you say can be true, and at the same time many pets can suffer too. Unsuitable housing, neglectfull or worse owners, bad circumstances. Evolution doesn’t guarantee happiness of individuals.
> the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all
That is a deep philosophical question. I have my doubts. But if it is true, why are you not breeding dogs at an industrial scale? After all every dog who could have been born but wasnt would be rather alive, if i hear you correctly. That is millions of potential dogs not born who you could have bread during your lifetime if you were more efficient about it.
> You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.
That is a great reason for not putting down old Fido and replacing him with a robot dog. I wouldn’t recommend that.
On the other hand if we just breed less dogs, and get robot pets to the people who are circumstantially, habitually, or emotionally less suited to have a living one. That way they can fulfill their emotional need without torturing a living animal.
I hope it’s not built on ROS or rely on it in any way!
Also kudos for bringing the joy of robotics back, since now most companies are riding the “defense” bandwagon and all robot companies I know suddenly are defense companies and visiting their sites is like the most dystopian thing ever, making it harder to find contract/jobs for people who want to make robotics for good not killing machines.
They may want to at least add a preference for keyboard layout, pretty sure that QWERTY and QWERTZ are much more common worldwide than AZERTY.
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