Hillside Meditations

I went to our local Tchibo shop this morning to get half a pound of fresh coffee beans to last me through next week and spent a little bit of time to see what “non-food items” or “consumer goods” Tchibo is offering at the moment (usually their non-food items are interesting and of quite acceptable quality at an agreeable price).

What I found was … PINO!

Pino is a little, cute, kewl a-little-more-than-a-toy robot as reported about in Japanese Robots blog: ” a cute Pinocchio for the 21st century.” Technically it seems similar to Sony´s Aibos (Artificial Intelligence Robots ) (without the camera); “its real revolutionary feature, though, is the fact that it is the first open-source robot, a kind of robotic version of the Linux operating system. made from off-the-shelf parts. More importantly, the specifications of the robot in terms of both hardware and software are freely available for anyone to modify and improve. ” The Pino project intends “to accelerate the research and development of humanoid robots by providing the technical information of PINO open to the public. Everyone can use PINO as a base of the research and development, in other words, to foster PINO to be more sophisticated humanoid robot.”

Tchibo is not the only place to get your personal Pino - while in 2001 the same (?) robot seems to have carried $ 65,000 price tag you can get yours now online for approx. €36.70 or US$44.40.

The most interesting thing about it seems that it can be educated by “personal” interaction: “Depending on the amount of tender loving care/mild disinterest/plastic-shattering violence you subject him to, Pino develops one of three personalities: shy, naughty, or friendly, which affects the way he responds to commands. Pino has a head sensor, two hand sensors, a sound sensor, infra red visor and a nose-mounted light sensor.”

Educating your Pino does not put too heavy a strain on you, though: “…Buy two Pinos; they interact brilliantly and, like kittens, are better fun in pairs.” - and removing (or replacing) the batteries resets Pinos personality (which I find rather shocking!).

Although the robots interact with each other it seems to be a good idea to plan how many of them you can care for in advance, after all - some people, like Luana already have problems fairly distributing leisure time among her robot companions and dealing with petty jealousies.

Being a huge fan of Isaac Asimov´s Robots (and Foundation) series of short stories and novels - and being the poor lonely little sucker I am - I almost spent the money to take a Pino home with me. What finally kept me is that I demand more of my personal robot than Pino has yet to offer:

• The concept of “Education” is appealing, especially as it is coupled with the concept of personal relationship (Pino will not develop as richly when he/it is UNHAPPY because of neglect or unsuitable interaction). It would be great if the range of possible “characters” or “personalities” would be larger than just three types, though.
• Of course Pino´ s personality should not get lost by a power break. This is unacceptable and is one major point to decide whether to classify Pino as a mere child´ s toy or something else. Should not be too hard to technically implement, though.
• “Real” speech would be great - though certainly difficult
• Pino should play chess.
• Small household jobs like sweeping up or vacuum cleaning the floor, answering the phone with an automated message and a recording function, should be with his range.
• Pino should take care of my calendar and time planner, reminding me when necessary.
• Like a walking smartphone Pino could phone people for me when I ask him to and of course Pino could have an internal, GPS-based navigation system making him the ideal car-copilot.
• Pino could interact with the Internet, like reading news tickers to me, or even blogs - yes, reading to me would be fine (even if this was only audio-book based).


• Pino should have radio-controlled and/or internet-controlled clock functions being able to tell the time of any given time-zone and alarm-waking me if necessary.
• Why not equip him with an MP3-player and enough storage space for a really large MP3-collection and the ability to get any MP3 I want from the Internet.
• One other little thing: Voice Recording. Pino should rember what he is told for later retrieval if desirable.
• AIBOs and “nuvos” already have the ability to capture images using a built-in camera and transfer the pictures to a PC via a LAN. It can even send then via the Internet so they can be viewed on a cell-phone.” Great!


• With enough optical and hearing capabilities Pino could guard the house.
• One tremendously important thing: Pino should be providing for or at least taking care of its own power supply - actively plugging in to electric outlets, collect sun energy or the like. Power breaks shoud not debilitate my household robot.

I am not going to have a robot living with me tomorrow - but from my researches today I gather that I might live long enough to really own one of my liking one day. I think this is one interesting and likeable prospect…

PS: Read here what Ian from Banana Oil has to say about “PersoComs”.

pino, robot, Tchibo, AIBO, ZMP, nuvo, Sony

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 29th, 2005 at 9:57 pm and is filed under regular, digicam photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.