Dancing bot rocks out in Wired vid

With Tokyo in an intense heat wave, there's nothing like a dancing robot to lift one's spirits from the humid doldrums. This great video from Wired and my roboticist pal Marek Michalowski features the "creature-like" robot Keepon developed at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology's (NICT) Kyoto research center. Developer Hideki Kozima created Keepon as a simple social communication robot with reactive and emotive abilities. Michalowski programmed him. There's more info about Keepon here.

Keepon is also interesting in that he exhibits unpredictable behavior based on sensor input data. Michalowski explained his jig to me thus:

For Keepon, "tempo" is an abstract property that can be perceived in lots of different modalities: sound, vision, accelerometer movement...when he perceives periodic events, he figures out the tempo and synchronizes to that. But his dancing "style" is an emergent property of randomly changing dance "parameters" rather than a scripted set of movements.

Keepon seems right out of Sesame Street or the Muppet Show to me, but this video proves his street cred. I also noticed that it features famous spots in Tokyo such as Tokyo Big Sight, the Kaminarimon Gate of Sensoji Temple, Akihabara's Radio Center Building and Chuo-dori street, Shibuya crossing, and the east side of Shinjuku Station. The final sequence with dancing kit robots like Manoi was filmed at robot retailer and educator RT Corp., also in Akihabara. Wired took liberties with the Tokyo backgrounds, inserting its logo into the visual chaos of neon and concrete.

Super kawaii Keepon rocks. He'll be at the Wired NextFest in LA next month.

New must-have toy: Manoi PF01

Remote-control toy maker Kyosho has finally started advance shipping of Manoi PF01, the latest in its athlete humanoid robot series that began with the AT01 model.

Its very stylish exterior, a big nod to doe-eyed characters from anime, was designed by robot boy wonder Tomotaka Takahashi of Robo-Garage. PF01 also boasts 17 degrees of freedom, though it appears a little less rugged than the award-winning AT01. Kyosho has a video of PF01 doing victory poses here.

Kyosho is offering 150 units until regular sales begin in June, price tag: $1,600 (189,000 yen). Today I saw a few boxes at RT in Akihabara, one of eight retailers nationwide, but Lem Fugitt of Robots-Dreams was there to snap pics of the first customers getting theirs.

No doubt PF01 will make waves beyond the robot otaku crowd!