PleoBot.com - Pleo The Dinosaur

This month’s issue of ROBOT Magainze features an exclusive interview with the makers of Pleo. In the article Tim Swieter talks with Ugobe’s Bob Christopher (CEO and Cofounder), John Sosoka (Chief Technical Officer), and Caleb Chung (Chief Inventor and Co-Founder).

Chung starts off by describing Ugobe’s vision, saying, “We are going after artifical life, and we hope our products create an emotional response in people.” He says that the reason for creating a new company is because industry is not set up to do such things right now. “Creating organic motion and coordinated gestures of moving all 14 motors at different degrees of speed and staying balanced at the same time was a breakthrough we were able to achieve.” Chung continues, “We can program this sort of thing in very little time - hours.” Bob Christopher says that Ugobe has invested over $1 million dollars in creating Pleo and that the toy industry wasn’t prepared to make that kind of investment - hence the new company.

John Sosoka describes the complexity of Pleo. “… there are clutches in the leg so that when the user starts torqueing on the leg, the internals don’t break. But we designed it so that Pleo knows when the leg is moving by an outside force, so he can cry out in pain.” Pleo also has a capacitive touch sensor under his skin to make touching him more lifelike - up until this point toys that featured “touch” only had buttons. Pleo also has high precision motors with high gearing and no backlash to make his motions as smooth and life-like as possible.

One example of Pleo’s lifelike behavior is his response to “lactic acid” code. “… when running all the motors in Pleo, the batteries wear out quickly. We had to write ‘lactic acid’ code to limit the current draw and have Pleo change behaviors and take a rest when the mtors are being inefficient due to current draw.” One of the practical examples of this is, “When Pleo walks, the carpet will drag on his feet. So his force feedback sensors will realizee that he is spending too much energy to walk around. Pleo will try different things to reduce the energy spent.”

Pleo will also come equipped with a SD slot that will allow users to edit his behavior and “adjust his age, hunger, fatigue and basic personality traits.” Christopher says, “We want to give the user the ability to change Pleo’s personality, animations and tricks. We also want to allow developers and hobbyists to take the SDK and motion system and behavior system and choreograph advanced features and animations for new AI functionality.”

Check out the Fall 2006 issue of ROBOT Magazine for the rest of the interview and tons of other great articles!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 3:59 pmand is filed under Pleo, Ugobe, interview. 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.