Photo: Toio Sony's Toio robot cube.

From Sony, the company that brought you the amazing Aibo and the slightly less amazing Rolly, comes a new consumer robotic toy: Toio, a toy platform consisting of little robotic cubes on wheels. Its much cuter and way more fun looking than it sounds, and could be just clever enough to keep kids interested for more than 5minutes (a common problem with a lot of robotic toys).

Heres the trailer that should give you an overview of what this thing is:

We dont have a lot of technical details on how the Toio cubes work, but they appear to have a pair of wheels at the bottom, some number of basic sensors, and bumps on top that are compatible with Legos. The robots are eachapproximately 32 mm 32 mm 19.2 mm (width depth height).

They communicate via Bluetooth to a video game-type console where you insert a cartridge, which tells the robots how to behave. There are alsomotion-sensing rings that act as controllers and let you make the robots drive and spin around.

But where things really get interesting is when you modify the cubes with basic crafting materials like paper and tape:

Toio kits come with specialmats, so were assuming that a lot of the neat tricks you see in these videos are made possible by optical pattern localization: This method allows robots to findtheir position byusing a downward facing camera andlooking at patterns underneath them. The robots then communicate with a centralized controllerto simulate interactive behavior with one another.

Robotic toy startupAnki may have been the first company to really make use of this technique, but its no longer unique to them. (Warehouse robotics company Kiva Systems, acquired by Amazon, also usedcameras to look at bar-coded stickers on the ground for localization.) The downside is that the functionality of the Toios are probably more limited when they are off of the mats, though it seems that you can use special cards to help them navigate:

That all looks like fun, for sure, but one thing to note is that this is not a regular, officialSony product. The companyis offering Toio through its crowdfunding platform, called First Flight,designed to incubateproduct ideas from Sony employees. The Toio team has engineers and designers from Sony headquarters as well asthe Sony Computer Science Laboratory, andcompany partners include Bandai, Lego, and Sony Music.The Toio website currently lists three different kits available for pre-order, each going for around30,000 yen, or about US$275.

Another thing to note is that, as with video game consoles, youll probably have to buy new cartridges from Sony if you want new behaviors for your Toios, and its unclear if they will be able to run code created using any of thevisual programming languages that are now popular among kids. If they turned out not to be programmable, the robots might not appeal to hobbyists and educators who value more open and hackable platforms.

Toio is certainly a clever little thing, and well see how things shake out in December, when the kits should start shipping.

[ Sony Toio ] via [ Fast Company ]

IEEE Spectrums award-winning robotics blog, featuring news, articles, and videos on robots, humanoids, drones, automation, artificial intelligence, and more. Contact us:e.guizzo@ieee.org

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Sony Adds Toio Cubes to Its Arsenal of Strange Robotic Toys - IEEE Spectrum