Some things we asked the developers about the new "aibo"

aibo

The aibo is a leg-type home autonomous entertainment robot. As for aibo as a product, as we have already announced in this magazine (Sony announces the reborn new "aibo"), we will omit it, but the purchase method is currently only direct sales from the Sony store online dedicated site.

The price is about 370,000 yen including tax, including the main unit 198,000 yen + communication service fee for 3 years + aibo care support with optional subscription. It has been sold several times, including lottery sales.

Before the topic of this interview, there were three points that the author paid attention to at the aibo presentation.

The first is the high-speed walking that aibo showed when President Hirai called "Aibo!" On the stage. This gait pattern, which the development group calls a "trot," is an attempt to achieve a run-up motion when the owner calls.

Some aibo owners describe trot walking as "running." It seems to be quite noticeable because there is a relative speed difference from normal walking. There may be other gait patterns.

The second is a camera for SLAM placed on the waist.

It is a camera for performing visual SLAM that finds feature points from images and performs self-position estimation and map generation at the same time. This is a feature unique to robots developed in recent years. With this technology, aibo will be able to "return to the charging stand from another room" (Takuma Morita).

Unfortunately, there are still no voices on SNS that actual users have realized the effect. The features of aibo's SLAM will be described later.

The third is the ToF sensor under the nose. ToF (Time of Flight) is a sensor that measures distance using projected light and its reflection.

To give you an idea of ​​the background, Sony acquired a company called Softkinetic Systems in Belgium on October 8, 2015. In June 2017, it was released that it became possible to acquire high-precision distance images 1.5 times as high as before in combination with back-illuminated CMOS.

Furthermore, after the aibo presentation held in November 2017, the company name of Softkinetic Systems was changed to "Sony Depth Sensing Solutions Holding". The back-illuminated ToF distance image sensor has been commercialized as "Depth Sense".

This is the sensor mounted on the tip of the nose (upper part of the mouth) of aibo.

What can we do in the future with the ToF used in the mouth of aibo? Looking at the video released during the Softkinetic era, it is used for gesture operation of in-vehicle devices. Attempts to use ToF as a spatial interface are one of the common uses that other companies are promoting, and are sometimes seen at exhibitions.

From here, you can easily understand why aibo has a ToF attached to its mouth, or that aibo is likely to be created in the future. Perhaps future aibo will be able to identify gestures. This will also be described later with an interview.