This little guy won us over in about 8 seconds. If only we could take him home and plug him into our USB drives! You can’t decide if you want to squueze him or eat him like a little snowman peeps.
He’s called Keepon (pronounced, “key-pong”) and he is part of the Infanoid/Beatbots Project.
BeatBots is a project to develop technologies and methodologies for human-robot interaction that incorporate the rhythmic properties of human interactive behavior.
We are currently developing and studying dance-oriented nonverbal play with between children and the robot Keepon, designed and built by Hideki Kozima. Keepon is a small creature-like robot developed to perform emotional and attentional interaction with children. If has four degrees of freedom, a soft rubber skin, two cameras in its eyes, and a microphone in its nose.
I’ll tell you what, we must be kids here because we start bopping everytime we pull someone new into the office to watch this guy.
link found via boingboing / New Scientist
