Interview with The Mind Behind Aibo 73
Ant sent us an interesting interview with the man behind the Aibo, Dr. Toshitada Doi. He heads the Digital Creatures Lab at Sony, talks about the history of the Aibo, and where he sees the future of pets going. Speaking as a person who shares his office with an Aibo I think they're neat, but there's still a lot of work to be done before they really break into the mainstream.
That only wet my appetite... (Score:1)
Everything I have seen so far has been very interesting - including a nice article concerning how attached to an Aibo someone really can become (the writer had just sent his Aibo back to have it's legs fixed). I want more! (And I want the $2500 to blow on an Aibo, instead of my house or my computer hardware
I want one but... (Score:2)
practicality (Score:1)
we found ourselves talking to the robot (Score:1)
During a demonstration of the dog here at CNET, we found ourselves involuntarily talking to the robot like we would to a real dog
Last time I checked, talking to a robot isn't anymore retarded than talking to a pet. It's actually equally fscking retarded.
Moderate me down ...
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On my list: (Score:1)
It is just too expensive right now. I am curious if anyone on this site will actually get one. I would love to know how they work.
I wonder how autonomous they really are.
Right now, I do not have the time or location for a real pet. One that does not eat, shed and shit sounds pretty good to me. Hopefully I could do a better job of keeping an AIBO alive than my plants.
The idea of raising an abused and unloved AIBO that runs for its life at the site of a pink ball also makes me laugh. Sorry.
They'll be ready for the mainstream (Score:1)
Will "human" companions be the next step then? (Score:1)
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Wrong number sold (Score:2)
NNTUS (Score:5)
I heard a news story on NPR ( sorry, no link ) that talked about a service that let you rent a dog for the afternoon. You didn't get to take it anywhere, you just walked it around the provided area, but you got to pick the dog you wanted.
Not to say that Americans won't buy this. I would love one, but in Japan, it may actually be a far more practical solution.
Aperios real-time OS (Score:2)
The dog uses the Aperios real-time operating system. More information is available on the Sony site [sony.co.jp].
I thought it was particularly interesting that it is IPv6 ready [keio.ac.jp]. Not many people can claim that for their pets! :-)
Electronic Pets (Score:2)
However, I think they're going completely the wrong way about it, to be honest. The more you pre-program, the more rigid and stupid the machine is going to be.
There's really no need to hardcode more than the absolute basics. Anything & everything else could (and should) be learned, with the ability for the software to adapt as necessary.
No, we're not talking Terminator or HAL-9000 technology here. A large, FAST neural net isn't difficult to code. Place the software in virtual reality, for a while (simulate as much time as you like), then dump into the robot's computer. Not that complicated to do.
Just a question (Score:2)
But surely that's an overreaction, it's just another hobby, albeit like paying for all of the food your dog will eat in a decade up front...
I just have to wonder how much wonder that there is present in the real, natural world, we're slowly losing contact in our growing fascatination (and growing market ability to be more so with more product lines) with the technological wonders around us...
Blah.
Old news? (Score:4)
Re:They'll be ready for the mainstream (Score:1)
Re:practicality (Score:1)
Really??? Aibo can play soccer for 50 years? WoW! I never thought the batteries would last that long! Are we going to have century-long robotic soccer leagues now? :-)
Do Aibos dream of electric cats? (Score:3)
Re:Will "human" companions be the next step then? (Score:1)
Probably human "pets" will be next. As they are harder to build, you'll have to do with Webbie Tookay [illusion2k.com] (get it?) for now. Not the same thing, I know.
I got to play with one... (Score:4)
My friend told me that they had spent considerable time training the thing to walk and to react by praising (pressing and holding the large button on it's head) it when it did something right or desirable and punishing (tapping the same button) it when it did something undesired.
It walks and if it falls over (or is pushed
It appears to have some level of intelligence and does appear to learn as it goes. If money were no object, I would love to have one of these. It's fun. When you don't want to play with it, you don't have to feel guilty. And it's a wonderful chick magnet.
The next version will be even cooler as when it's battery begins to run down, it will seek and go to it's charging base to recharge itself.
It's an interesting toy for now, but too expensive. I do agree that 10 to 20 years from now, this will be very common in peoples homes.
And just think, Asimov was right again...
Russ
Re:I got to play with one... (Score:1)
Re:practicality (Score:1)
Pope
Re:That only wet my appetite... (Score:3)
Re:Electronic Pets (Score:1)
Exactly what you ask for, but in a cat [genobyte.com].
Rumor has it they plan on turing it into a consumer robot sometime in the next year or so.
How about an AIBO feature article? (Score:4)
CmdrTaco and/or Hemos could write an essay about life with an AIBO. I'm sure that between the two of you, there are plenty of amusing stories accumulated already...
Question: Commercial AI/Robotics (Score:2)
The Kulturwehrmacht [onelist.com]
Hey. (Score:2)
Hey - leave that thing alone, GET OFF!
Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com]
Re:Electronic Pets (Score:2)
No, we're not talking Terminator or HAL-9000 technology here. A large, FAST neural net isn't difficult to code. Place the software in virtual reality, for a while (simulate as much time as you like), then dump into the robot's computer. Not that complicated to do.
While the flexibility of neural networks is great, they need to be trained (Dead on, on the offline training btw). The bad thing: When training that neural network you need to be working towards a goal.
How do you define that goal? You've got (assuming some sort of feedforward or derivative network) an output layer generating some output vector, and you're comparing it to an established goal vector. How do you define a goal vector for a behaviour? Is the euclidean distance from your output vector to the goal vector a valid metric for determining error? I can see that being very unpleasant to formulate...
Not that it wouldn't be a cool research project...
[OFF] Re:Do Aibos dream of electric cats? (Score:3)
One added element in DADOES, it was considered bad citizenship not to own a live animal. It was everyone's duty to own and care for animals, but average people could not afford anything larger than small pets. To prove their citizenship and empathy (read: humanity) people displayed fake animals on the roofs of their houses.
This book is so good it makes me want to cry.
Forgetting a few things? (Score:1)
especially when comparing real dogs to AIBO.
Everyone forgot one thing...a real dog shows geniuine affection for its owner (assuming your not a cruel abusing bastard). Some pet owners, myself included, would say our dogs love us, and we love them, just like any other family member.
AIBO is a neat toy, but when the day comes that robotic dogs, or people for that matter, have feelings, then what do we do? Or if their simulated intelligence begins to challenge our own?
"You want me to chase this stupid little pink ball? I dont think so. How bout you go get the oil can and the battery charger for me, or I'll break you neck".
Heh.
"I know what love is Jenny"
Dr. Toshitada Doi (Score:1)
K-9 in an Aibo body! (Score:2)
I know this will get moderated down but my karma can take it and I needed my geek fix for the day.
More cyberpets (Score:2)
I'd like to see the Cyberlife people team up with the Sony people and put their seriously advance AI code into a hardware device. (Wow, how about a "real live" Norn? That would be awesome. They'd just have to have a longer lifespan than that in the game - about 8 hours.
I think the most interesting aspect of the Cyberlife technology is the synthesis of a "biophysical" system in software - they have code to simulate digestive, circulatory, immunological systems, etc, completely outside of the neural network that makes up their cognitive system.
If you could marry that concept with hardware to emulate it (i.e. the battery is getting low so the feedback to the brain is "I'm hungry!") I bet you could come up with some seriously complicated and complex emergent behaviours.
-=-=-=-=-
Re:They'll be ready for the mainstream (Score:1)
Re:I got to play with one... (Score:1)
Re:Will "human" companions be the next step then? (Score:1)
Re:We need a new AIBO feature VERY BADLY (Score:1)
A Good website for Aibo... (Score:1)
They show off their photos, discuss various problems, remark about the AI, etc..
The website is called Aibonet [aibonet.com].
The Aibo is THE girl magnet for geeks. I've seen a crowd of women cooing over an Aibo that some guy owned. ;)
Aibo does fetch...just not sticks
Re:That only wet my appetite... (Score:2)
D
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Man inside the AIBO? (Score:1)
I don't buy it. Admittedly I believed the
little people inside the TV thing until I was
twelve, but I caught on eventually. I'm sure
there's just computers and stuff in there.
~yair
Oops. Never mind. Reading is hard.
Re:I got to play with one... (Score:2)
Actually, the current version has "recharge" as one of its instincts. Although it cannot get onto its charging base by itself, it will ask you to when its batteries get low.
Aibo works by 4 different instincts, and 6 different emotions. The emotions are (I believe) percentages - so Aibo could be at any given time 10% angry, 20% loving, and 70% curious.
More information about aibo can be found at this site [aibonet.com], which includes a link to Sony's official Aibo site.
Needs fur (Score:1)
Re:Electronic Pets (Score:2)
However, let's assume you do use an absolute list. This -does- get complex, as your output is a time-dependent matrix.
In other words, your error is sampled not just over an instantaneous output, but over a period of time.
Let's take an example. Say your robot dog is trying to walk from one end of a room to another. It encounters an obsticle. It's no use the dog just turning left. Yes, it's no longer obstructed, but it's now going in the wrong direction. BUT, it's ONLY the wrong direction because it didn't turn back on course, once the obstruction was avoided.
An equally valid solution would be to turn right, and walk around the obstruction that way. Or to jump over, if the dog is capable of that.
Once the robot has made it's manoevers, the external error is in the angle away from reaching the final objective. This needs to be mapped onto the matrix for the entire sequence, so that you can back-propogate, to correct the neural net.
Re:I want one but... (Score:1)
[humor]
The way how some of the
[/humor]
How do you know that for sure? (Score:1)
actions, but I don't really know what's going
on inside his head. I don't know how he's
thinking, or if anything even remotely like
emotions are happening inside the complex flesh
computer that's his brain. It's not like it really
matters to me that I don't understand my cat --
I often interpret some *very* human motivations to
my cat that almost certainly arn't really there,
and it doesn't really bother me.
That being said, I imagine one of the problems
with AIBO would be that it's not warm. One of the
things that makes it hard to snuggle with my
Iguanas is that they're cold-blooded, and so
very often they're not pleasant to snuggle with
because all the warmth goes from me to them. My
cat is a lot more pleasant to snuggle with because
he's warm on his own
heat tolerances could be designed into an AIBO to
allow it to have a preferred warmer than room
temperature body..
Re:Electronic Pets (Score:1)
Re:we found ourselves talking to therobot (Score:1)
I am sure the "first post" couldn't boast such a grasp of the English (or any other) language.
Re:Electronic Pets (Score:1)
How exactly would you determine when to be, say, "frisky"? Or rather, we have a neural network with a bunch of sensor inputs, some other state data, etc. How do you take that input, run it through a network, and decide that the emotion you'd like Aibo (or Robokoneko) to exhibit is "frisky" --> where you've gone and developed some subsystem (perhaps a neural network) to provide the physical "friskiness" of the robot?
I took a very quick look around http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~degaris/papers/ and didn't find anything that indicated how they planned to train the network(s) (Although there was quite a bit of interesting stuff to read). One of the bits of correspondence I found questioned how higher level control (not just basic positioning/simple actions) was going to be done, and I didn't really see an answer to it. Again, I just took a quick look around, I don't have the time (today) to read through all the papers...
You wrote :
However, let's assume you do use an absolute list. This -does- get complex, as your output is a time-dependent matrix.
In other words, your error is sampled not just over an instantaneous output, but over a period of time.
Let's take an example. Say your robot dog is trying to walk from one end of a room to another. It encounters an obsticle. It's no use the dog just turning left. Yes, it's no longer obstructed, but it's now going in the wrong direction. BUT, it's ONLY the wrong direction because it didn't turn back on course, once the obstruction was avoided.
In this case, a shortest path algorithm would be much better :) Your net's outputs are driving the velocity/acceleration of motors, so, at any given moment you'd like : the acceleration to be smooth (good to backpropagate errors immediately), and the dog to be heading along a predetermined path (After all, this is what offline training's all about : predetermined data). Hum, this bit's come out all wrong! Anyway, the size/space requirements for most of the input data is pretty small (probably under a gigabyte or so), so offline training is probably viable.
ur the retard (Score:1)
Distributed AIBO Computing (Score:2)
There are 15,000 different sets of the AIBO AI being taught how to interact with a human environment. One of the neatest things I've come across reading about how people using their AIBOs was from aibosite.com [aibosite.com]'s FAQ. Apparently some AIBO users have found their AIBOs have developed rudimentary face-recognition, even though Sony claims that no such software was installed in untrained AIBOs.
This might light up some people's Big Brother radars, but what if those 15,000 trained AIBOs downloaded the product of their training into a central database at which someone(probably Sony, but what are the possibilities of GPLing the training you've given your AIBO?) can sort through the best of the acquired programs and redistribute them to new AIBO purchasers? With so many individuals constantly training(ie, improving the software of) their AIBOs, wouldn't the software increase dramatically?
Eh I think this is what he was going for. (Score:2)
-cherish the memory of; yearn for
-love; attachment; adoration
-companion
-partner; pal; accomplice
Now, this may seem OT to some of you, but I read through various postings here, saying all the Aibo lacks dramatically is the ability to love it's owner back, like a real dog. I just happened to look up the name...and seeing these definitions in correspondance with what was said here on
Mmm...Sony.
And yes, an Aibo is a great chick magnet. We are known for our expensive tastes ^-^
miyax
Re:How do you know that for sure? (Score:1)
Give it a PIII for a brain, and you have an instant heater
Re:Will "human" companions be the next step then? (Score:1)
Re:I want one but... (Score:1)
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
Re:Hey. (Score:1)
-- Naked Came the Robot, Barry Longyear
Re:Dr. Toshitada Doi (Score:1)
Re:OPEN THE SLASHDOT SOURCE!!! (Score:1)
Vermifax