Kanako Sakuraba
CIS 203
Dr. Pei Wang
Robotic Toys
-- Toys for Adults –
These years, robotic toys have attracted the attentions of people all over the world. For instant, TV advertisements of robotic toys on kids’ cartoon time have been dramatically increased. If you watch Kids WB for two hours, you can see at least three different ads of these products. When you go to a toy store, the products that are displayed in the first row are entertainment robotic pets. Needless to say, those high technology products have been changing features of toy markets. This fact tells that robotic toy is one of the few examples of AI fields that not only successfully attracts business markets but also came into existence in the real world. However, some questions come out with the newcomer toys. Do consumers know what the toys in ads on TV are? What kinds of robotic products are in the market? What are similarities and differences among them? What do professionals consider them? What do users do with those toys? The purpose of this project is answer the above questions by the ways of giving the basic information of robotic toys, exploring one kind of the products that get attentions of not only children but also professionals, and finding the difficulties of toys with its criticisms as well as having fun myself with one of the toys.
<Robotic
toys>
-Definition
First of all, what is robotics? By Dowling, the robotic is a word consists of two concepts, “robot” plus something, that is the definition of robot “A programmable, multifunctional manipulator designed to move material, parts, tool or specified devices through various programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks (Robot Institute of America, 1979) ”, plus, “For through intelligence where AI meet the real world.” With this definition, robotic toy is a product which is programmed to do things by artificial intelligence that successfully “meet the (general consumers’) world”.
- History
The first robotic toy in the history cannot be simply quoted. It can be different in terms of what is regarded as robotic toy. It may be Tickle Me Elmo by Fisher Price in 1996 because it contains more chips than ever (Walker). It can be 1998 Tiger Electronics Inc. Furby, the first “interactive animatronics toy” that influenced the toy market to go to the new era. Or AIBO, in 1999, Sony launched this pet-robot that has actual abilities of senses, walking, and learning. Some people believe Poochi, cheaper version of AIBO by Sony’s rival, is the very first robotic toy in the history if toys are only for children.
In my opinion, the first one should be Furby. The reasons are:
1. Tickle Me Elmo is hardly categorized as robotics because it responses only when the button inside its tummy is pushed.
2. Furby’s impact was so shocking to toy markets that major toy companies started fighting to create their own interactive toys. In other words, it is no exaggeration to say that Furby made new history.
3. Poochi (2000) and Aibo (1999) are forms of descendants of Furby. They are inherited of Furby’s features such as sort of animal figures, interactive ability with human, and show their own feelings.
http://members.tripod.com/~Eeyore_2/Wanna_Be_Pages/wannabeoct1998.html
-Robotic Toy Types
Robotic toys are generally categorized into two styles. One is an interactive toy and its latest products allow users to train and to raise it to make it “talented”. The other is innovative which a user can design, build, program and run it.
·
Interactive type (e.g. AIBO and Super Poochi)
The popular examples of the interactive type of robotic toys are Sony’s AIBO and Super Poo-chi by Tiger Electronic Inc. (Although, Aibo cannot be simply categorized as a toy because of its spectacular features and its price, I would like to introduce it here because its’ big market and influences on other similar products.)
Both are pet-type robotic that are programmed to express their emotions, learn some skills by sequences of training during playing with their owners, and grow up to adult level. Super-Pooch has 3 growing up stages, baby, puppy, and adult (lazy, faithful, talented), Aibo’s depends on its user’s interactive and programming during the puppy stage. Also, those two have voice recognition system and respond to the owners’ voices. They both are electric consuming toys, for example, Super-Pooch needs 3 AA batteries and its operating time is 3 hours, AIBO needs 3 hour for full charging and run 1.5 hour (AIBO is money consuming, too. It needs AC adaptor $100 or the adaptor and Energy Station $200 to charge).
There are also some differences between those two. First of all, price varies. Robo-chi series are sold from about $10 to $50, but AIBO costs much more than those prices, the cheapest model, ERS-311/-312, is $850. The price of the latest model, ERS-220 that is expected to be sold on November 28th this year is $1500. Secondly, the features are quite not the same. The new version of Poo-chi, Super Poo-chi, has two sensors (one on jaw to detect food and sound sensor on chest), 2 switches(one works for touching sensor, and the other for training). Unfortunately, the toy is not able to walk like AIBO but it can do other things such as dancing, moving its tail, ears and legs, turning head and expressing its 6 different emotions by eyes. On the other hand, 2nd generation of AIBO, ERS-210, has more specifications, including 4 touch sensors, an image sensor, an infrared distance sensor, and a temperature sensor. It can move, moreover, users can program its behaviors by using software.
·Innovative type
(MindStroms R.I.S. and others)
Unfortunately, despite the popularity of Interactive robotic toys, innovative robot toys do not get so much attention of general consumers or journalists, as you may notice. The biggest reason is there is no advertisement on public media that helps to catch consumers’ eyes. Believe or not, I was one of them who did not know this type of product until I look up on web pages. However, for engineers, this type of toys are very much more famous than the other type. Not few universities use this in courses to teach students computer engineering.
The most popular innovative type must be LEGO MindStorms series. The reason may be its worldwide market and big name LEGO.
· What
is LEGO MindStroms Robotic Invention System?
LEGO MindStormsÔ Robotic Invention System are the work LEGO and MIT Media Lab in 1998. Their goal was “creat(ing) a new generation of toys that enable children to explore and understand concepts that were previously reserved for the university classroom.” (Tech Talk) The kit contains one RCX brick, one infrared tower to send signals from a computer to RCX brick, 2 motors, 1 light sensor, 2 touch sensors, one CR-ROM, and other 713 small LEGO parts. However, in spite of their first aim, this product is in great demand by computer “engineers and other professionals”(Abbot), and there are some competitions using the product are held in the world. I will discuss about the competitions later in this paper.
Among all other the MindStroms series, Robotic Invention System is the most popular product because of its possibilities of assembling. For example, unlike the product, a number of robotic kits that are available in markets have concrete construction concepts, for example, Fischertechnik technology kits “Industry Robot” or “Pneumatic Robots” (Fischertechnik has been produced “computer-operated” robotic kits since 1983). On the other hand, MindStroms does not have such a limit and all the possibilities it has depends on the user’s creativity.
Basically, innovative type has to be built from pieces, so engineering skills may be needed; therefore, this type is not a toy for infants or under-teenage children. However, for those who do not have enough knowledge of the technology, assembly manual teaches how to build step by step very well.
- Criticisms and New Aspect
There are many criticisms particularly against interactive pet-type toys. Most of them consider these toys as an intruder on small children education and innovative robot toys are targeting older children, moreover, younger teenagers. That is a reason that those criticisms focus on interactive type. Some of educators worry that the children mix up the real life and machine world due to playing with such toys for long time. According to Alliance For Child, “child development experts and psychologist … warn that highly programmed toy actually distract young children from real play with real playmates.”
However, there is “no evidence that kids are being less creative.” Also there is an opinion that “creativity doesn’t look lie it did 30 or 40 years ago.” There is another problem that toys are too difficult for children to handle with, considering programming steps and “remembering the commands.” (USA Today)
Is there any good aspect of robotic toys? There are some good characteristics of the toys. Those toys can give parents opportunities to be playmates of their children in order to help them to handle the high-technology toys. Also, children who cannot have pets at home may get some experiences of having a pet. (I’d like to stress on the word “some” because the toy is not a living creature which requires a lot of responsibilities. Some pet lovers are furious about the concept of this product since the user can do anything on it to make him/her meet their own satisfactions. If s/he does not like the outcome they can reset and raise it up again.)
<The World of Innovative
Robotic Toy (MindStormsÔ R.I.S.) >
- Competitions
of MindStorms
As I mentioned, there are several tournament-type competitions in the world, using robots toy. Participating one of the contests is the best way of learning robotics because looking at others works makes you recognize new aspects, touching and building your own leads your knowledge to the stage where you can not learn in lectures, and above all, enjoying the robots may change your attitude toward the basic concept of studying, from conservative learning style to new studying-and-having a fun.
The first example of the LEGO tournament is the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) LEGO League, so-called FLL since1998. FLL is a nation- wide team-competition for children between 9 and 14, and its participants have 8 weeks to get ready and their robots are judged by three categories, Performance, Technical Quality, and Presentation of Research. Each year FLL has a different topic for participant to compete. This year’s assignment is creating a robot to rescue the scientists who are trapped in the Arctic and collect instruments. The scores depend on the performance. (detail is available on http://www.firstlegoleague.org/sitemod/design/layouts/default/index.asp?pid=120 )
The second example is a private contest MIT’s 6.270 that only the students in 6.270 class can be participants. The students in the course make two- or three- member teams and they are given less than a month period to design, build and debug a robot using LEGO. The example of college private competition using LEGO is LEGO Robot Competition in Mechanical Engineering at University of New Mexico sometimes since 1996. All the participants (18 students) of the contest are drawled by an instructor of the university, Dr. Starr, and this year topic was marshmallow-transferring relay in a maze.
For more information:
http://www.mit.edu:8001/courses/6.270/home.html (MIT 6.270 page)
http://www.me.unm.edu/~starr/lego/lego.html (U of NM LEGO Robot Competition)
The third and fourth examples are by American Association for Artificial Intelligence, one is so-called Botball (this is for high school students) and the other is Robot Building Laboratory (for AI beginners). The main purpose of both programs is for students “to experiment with hardware”, and the goal stages of both are competitions among the students.
-
Working Robots of MindStorms
There are the number MindStorms robotic toys that were invented by from children to professional engineers. I discuss about robotics by amateur creators here. The reason is the main purpose of this paper is about robotic toy that general people can learn some AI concept with. The first robot I will introduce here is my favorite “Cat and Fish” by Rich111. As you can imagine by its name, his work consists of mainly two parts, cat and fish in a bowl. You need to put a coin to run the robot. Once a coin is in its slot, the cat moves its head as if it aims the swimming fish in the bowl. According to his comment, the cat part has a light sensor which can detect the moving fish by the numeric value of colors in RCX. The second example is “Black Jack Player” by Kayo. He created a robotic toy that can not only deal cards to one player and a house (one up and the other down!) but also reads the cards while distributing and calculate the scores (He wrote bars represented numbers on each card because the program could not read the number well). If the user loses, the robot makes sound “boo”.
http://mindstorms.lego.com/community/halloffame/previouswinners.asp
<My MindStroms Robot>
To understand the robotic toy capabilities, I chose to make one simple robotic with MindStroms Robotic Invention System 2.0, the 3rd version of the MindStroms. (the my first choice was AIBO, which is not needed to be built with my poor engineering skill, however, because of the price, I chose the other product.)
-
Building Process
Building one toy was much harder than what I had expected before opening the kit. At first, for trial, I built a simple robot car that goes away from a bright light and changes the direction when it hits something. Then, for this project I tired to create a robot arm which grabs an object, rotates the arm and put the object on another place. However, even with the brief instruction that came with the kit, I could not make it run right. Although I managed to build the arm (I have spent about ten hours), there were construction errors that I could not find and then the robot was not able to lift the arm. That was the reason my robot “Deliverer” was created.
To assemble this robot, I spent more than 5 hours of struggling with finding small parts, breaking nails, and sometimes biting the parts off. “Deliverer” briefly consists of belts, wheels, and motors and some sensors. This toy have 2 motors, one is for moving wheels, another for moving belts to place an object on itself, 2 touch sensors, one for detecting an object to be moved, another for checking if the object is placed in a right place on the belt, and1 light sensor to check if there is an object to be moved on the belt.
Roughly speaking, a motor controls a wheel to move the car, when an obstacle hits on its bumper, it changes its direction, then when it finds something in the middle of its bumper, it moves its belts and loads the object on the body and moves again to find the place to unload. After unloading the object, it stops. The most difficult thing of building my robot was finding an appropriate part to put them together to make one working car. There were a number of look-alike parts those only differences were their lengths. For example, I used 8 different-length black bars to support wheels or its body.
-
Programming Process
The programming application which comes with other parts is a sort of simple version of C or C++, for examples, “Yes or No” and “Repeat” functions work the same as “while” “if” and “while” in C. The number of blocks which already contain a sequence of actions are called big blocks, one of their examples is “go forward for x sec” in which has 4 actions start with set the rotation of a motor (clockwise or counter-clockwise), turn the motor on, wait for x sec and finally turn the motor off.
The most difficult thing in programming my robot was setting the value of the amount of light, dark and not-dark, in order to make it detect if there is something to load. The amount of lights in a room is changed by the weather, time, or objects in the room(they make shades).
<Findings>
Through this research, I found out that both interactive and innovative robotic toys have some difficulties for children; moreover, some are very serious for being toys. The first of all, programming them needs either basic knowledge of high-level language such as C++, or patience to read programming instructions carefully and digest all commands. For small children, the programming process is very boring and as you know they are spontaneous creatures. Similar to the programming problem, interactive types require the charging time that makes children to wait again. Thirdly, like other computer products, these products sometimes cannot be fixed due to either inner or outer damages. All you can do is sent it to the manufacturer and wait if they can fix it. This problem is crucial for toys for kids. As you know, children cannot control their power on even fragile toys especially when they get frustrated. Unfortunately the robotic toys have the number of possibilities to make people annoy.
In conclusion, these advanced products should not be considered to be the same toys in 10 years ago. Some of education professionals who criticized tend to stick to the image of the conventional toys. I remember the first time Nintendo launched the video game to the world, it was the center of more criticisms than ever. However, the result was a big success despite cold eyes of parents or educators. The most important factor in great victory in toy market is children love the product. According to an article in USA today, a kid liked it even though he had no idea about what he was doing with the toy (Thomas). If the word toy would be used, some additional information should be added, such as “toys for children or adults who are patient and smart enough to use this appropriately”.
<References>
AIBO’s Official Site
Alliance for Childhood Press Release “Robotic Baby Dolls Names Worst Toy Idea of the Year”
http://www.allianceforchildhood.net/projects/computers/press_release.htm
Botball, KISS Institute for Practical Robotics
Dowling, Kevin. “Robotic Frequency Asked Questions List”
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/robotics-faq/
Fischertechnik Company Site
LEGO MindStormsÔ Official Site
Stark, Kim. “AIBO, Poochi, and Other Robot Dogs”
http://members.tripod.com/~Eeyore_2/Essays/aibo.html
Thomas, Karen. “An early education in tech toys”
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/bonus/1200/cb009.htm