Category Archives: robotics/home-robots

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Meet Haru, the Unassuming Big-Eyed Robot Helping Researchers Study Social Robotics

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This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Honda Research Institute’s (HRI) experimental social robot Haru was first introduced at the ACM/IEEE Human Robot Interaction conference in 20181. The robot is designed as a platform to investigate social presence and emotional and empathetic engagement for long-term human interaction. Envisioned as a multimodal communicative agent, Haru interacts through nonverbal sounds (paralanguage), eye, face, and body movements (kinesics), and voice (language). While some of Haru’s features connect it to a long lineage of social robots, others distinguish it and suggest new opportunities for human-robot interaction. Haru is currently in its first iteration, with plans underway for future development. Current research with Haru is conducted with core partners of the Socially Intelligent Robotics Consortium (SIRC), described in more detail below, and it concentrates on its potential to Continue reading Meet Haru, the Unassuming Big-Eyed Robot Helping Researchers Study Social Robotics→

Robot Gift Guide 2019

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Welcome to the eighth edition of IEEE Spectrum’s Robot Gift Guide! This year we’re featuring 15 robotic products that we think will make fantastic holiday gifts. As always, we tried to include a broad range of robot types and prices, focusing mostly on items released this year. (A reminder: While we provide links to places where you can buy these items, we’re not endorsing any in particular, and a little bit of research may result in better deals.) If you need even more robot gift ideas, take a look at our past guides: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012. Some of those robots are still great choices and might be way cheaper now than when we first posted about them. And if you have suggestions that you’d like to share, post a comment below to help the rest of us find the perfect robot gift.

Blue Frog Robotics Answers (Some of) Our Questions About Its Delayed Social Robot Buddy

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In September of 2015, Buddy the social home robot closed its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign more than 600 percent over its funding goal. A thousand people pledged for a robot originally scheduled to be delivered in December of 2016. But nearly three years later, the future of Buddy is still unclear. Last May, Blue Frog Robotics asked for forgiveness from its backers and announced the launch of an “equity crowdfunding campaign” to try to raise the additional funding necessary to deliver the robot in April of 2020. By the time the crowdfunding campaign launched in August, the delivery date had slipped again, to September 2020, even as Blue Frog attempted to draw investors by estimating that sales of Buddy would “increase from 2000 robots in 2020 to 20,000 in 2023.” Blue Frog’s most recent communication with backers, in September, mentions a new CTO and a North American office, but does little to Continue reading Blue Frog Robotics Answers (Some of) Our Questions About Its Delayed Social Robot Buddy→

Labrador Systems Developing Affordable Assistive Robots for the Home

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Developing robots for the home is still a challenge, especially if you want those robots to interact with people and help them do practical, useful things. However, the potential markets for home robots are huge, and one of the most compelling markets is for home robots that can assist humans who need them. Today, Labrador Systems, a startup based in California, is announcing a pre-seed funding round of $2 million (led by SOSV’s hardware accelerator HAX with participation from Amazon’s Alexa Fund and iRobot Ventures, among others) with the goal of expanding development and conducting pilot studies of  “a new [assistive robot] platform for supporting home health.”