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History of Robotics Research and Development of Japan2002BusinessEntertainment Robot AIBO

Masahiro FujitaSony Co.
Koji KageyamaSony Co.
Tadashi OtsukiSony Co.
Satoshi AmagaiSony Co.
Toshi.T. DoiSony Co.
We proposed “Robot Entertainment” as a new robotics application aiming at a new entertainment in which a robot interacts with users in realworld. In 1997 we announced the development of a prototype of a small autonomous quadruped robot, and in 1999 we started selling AIBO ERS-110 as a consumer product. It was about 250K JPY, which was expensive as a consumer product, however, 3000 bodies of AIBO were sold out in only 20minutes through the Internet in Japan. After AIBO was introduced into the market, there were many kinds of toy robots and R&D activities for home robots. It showed AIBO gave a big impact to society, and indicated a possibility as human symbiotic robots. There are mainly two types of activities in our Robot Entertainment. These activities contributed to a progress of robot industry as products and technologies. 1) Fully autonomous pet type robot as a consumer product: AIBO has five instincts (Sleep, Curiosity, Affection, Battery-Charging, Excercise) and six emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Surprize, Fear, Disgust) , and self-developing by interaction with users and environment. It is a fully autonomous robot achieved by advanced recognition and machine learning technologies with sophisticated autonomous agent architecture. 2) Development of OPEN-R as an open architecture for robot development: OPEN-R was proposed to establish a new robot industry. It defines APIs of basic hardware and software modules, so that developers can easily build new types of robots. AIBO and OPEN-R were deployed as a common platform by RoboCup 4 legged robot league, where many universities competitively developed technologies of walking, visual recognitions, SLAM, ball controls, and team collaborative behaviors. The source codes developed by the universities were opened. Thus it heavily contributed to rapid technology progress of robotics. 7th RSJ Technical Innovations Award in 2002.
1997年にAIBO試作機として発表されたモデル
A prototype of AIBO developed and announced in 1997
1999年発売の最初のAIBO ERS-110
AIBO ERS-110: the first product model in 1999
AIBO Series. ERS-311, ERS-220, ERS-110, ERS-210．ERS-7 (from left)
AIBO Series. ERS-311, ERS-220, ERS-110, ERS-210．ERS-7 (from left)
RoboCup 1999 Final (ERS-110 base Platform)
RoboCup 1999 Final (ERS-110 base Platform)

Movies

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A prototype of Pet type robot in 1997
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RoboCup 4 Legged robot league 2002: Final
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AIBO ERS-7 Promotion Video

Correspondence papers

Masahiro Fujita：Robot Enteretainment: A Small Qualruped Autoomous Robot

Journal of the RSJ, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 313-314, 1998 (in Japanese).

Masahiro Fujita：Emotional Expression of a Pet-type Robot

Journal of the RSJ, Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 947-951, 1999 (in Japanese).

Kohtaro Sabe, and Masahiro Fujita：Turning Entertainment Robot into Product

Journal of the RSJ, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 185-187, 2000 (in Japanese).

Masahiro Fujita：Four-Legged Robot League

Journal of the RSJ, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 15-19, 2002 (in Japanese).

Masahiro Fujita, Koji Kageyama, Tadashi Otsuki, Satoshi Amagai, Toshi.T. Doi：Development of Entertainment Robot AIBO

Journal of the RSJ, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 55-56, 2003 (in Japanese).

Related papers

Author
[1] Masahiro Fujita: Robots for Kids, Robot Entertainment, pp.XX-YY, Edited by A.Druin and J.Hendler, The Morgan Kaufmann, 2000 Journal.

[2] G. Hornby, S.Takamura,T. Yamamoto, and M. Fujita, “Autonomous Evolution of Dynamics Gaits with Two Quadruped Robots”, IEEE transactions on Robotics, Vol.21, No.3, pp.402—410, 2005.

[3] Masahiro Fujita, “On Activating Human Communications With Pet-Type Robot AIBO”, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol.92, No.11, pp.1804—1813, 2004.

[4] Masahiro Fujita, “AIBO: Toward the Era of Digital Creatures”, The International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol.20, No.10, pp,781--794, Saga Publications, 2001.

[5] Masahiro Fujita, Hiroaki Kitano, and Koji Kageyama, “A Reconfigurable Robot Platform”, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Vol.29, pp.119—132, Elsevier, 1999.

[6] Masahiro Fujita and Hiroaki Kitano, “Development of an Autonomous Quadruped Robot for Robot Entertainment”, Autonomous Robots, Vol.5, pp.7—18, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998.

Refered Conference Papers

[7] Fujita, M., Hasegawa, R.,Gabriel, C., Takagi, T.,Yokono, J.,and Shimomura, H.,” An Autonomous Robot that eats information via interaction with human and environment”, Int. Workshop on Robot-Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN) (Bordeaux and Paris, FRN), pp. 383—389, 2001.

[8] Fujita, M. and Kitano, H. and Kageyama, K., “Reconfigurable Pysical Agents”, The 2nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pp. 54—61, 1998.

[9] Fujita, M. and Kageyama, K., “An Open Architecture for Robot Entertainment”, Proceeding of the 1st International Conference on Autonomous Agents, pp. 435—440, 1997.

Web

[10] Enteretainment Robot AIBO, http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/aibo/

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