Pleo’s not dead
The Pleo story is not over! This little dinosaur robot designed by UGOBE had lots of buzz (for over a year) before it came out, presenting at DEMO and other techno-elite venues. But a few months ago, the website disappeared and it looked like Pleo was done. But now Jetta Company Limited has acquired the assets of Ugobe and will re-launch the Pleo robot.
My lab worked with UGOBE under their academic partnerships program. They sent us a couple of Pleos and gave us early access to the Pleo Development Kit (PDK). It was a fun little platform to play around with, but ultimately didn’t quite have enough juice to be a compelling platform for our social learning and HRI research. Mainly because it was easy to script the robot, but not so easy to make it dynamic and interactive due to flaky sensors and limited on-board processing power. But for the price point, you can’t expect too too much.
What I hope they add in the next rev. is wireless control. I’d love to be able to easily control Pleos from our existing codebase for AI/HRI. Let’s see…
Please could you tell me more about the PDK? Are you able to change pleos abilities/behaviours? Thank You
Comment by PleoBlog | June 19, 2009
Yes you could write scripts for the Pleo in pawn, and easily make it respond with certain animations to certain sensor contexts. In our experience the touch sensors were the most reliable. At the time we played around with it the camera and mic were not accessible through the API.
Here is the project that a couple of students did with the Pleo for my HRI class in Spring 2008.
Comment by A.L.T. | June 19, 2009