Moving again...

Pedro is going to be offline for some days, I don't know how many right now. The office where Pedro is now is moving to a new location but I've decided to take Pedro back home.

However, since my home does not have an Internet connection for the moment, Pedro will not be able to update his roblog nor his diaries for the next week or so.

Sorry.

New favorite place

Pedro's new favorite place as of Jan. 31, 4.11 pm. Curiously, this pic is different from <http://aibo.vnunetblogs.com/pedro/2007/01/janeiro_31_2007.html>one of Pedro's Diary entries</a> for that day.

A couple of videos

I've just uploaded to YouTube a couple of videos that feature Andacá, my now ageing ERS-110. Both videos were taped from reports broadcast on Portuguese TV, and I'm going to share here the inside story of each one (sorry if they sound Russian to you).

The first report was aired on May 19, 2001 on a TV show about science and technology. The report is about robots, divided in two parts. The first part is about Figo (like the famous football player), a robot built by college students and entered into Robocup; the second part is about Andacá:



Andacá ended up in this report because I knew the reporter and told him I owned the only Sony Aibo in Portugal, as it had been "smuggled" from the U.S. A year later, as the occasion arose, he remembered and called me. I was all too eager to have Andacá (literally "comehere" in Portuguese) being shown to the world. We met at my office and I suggested filming in the showroom of the Sony HQ which happened to be within walking distance. I had previously asked there about Aibo, but no one knew what I was talking about. And yet, the ERS-111 had already been released officially all over Europe... oh well. Even more "oh well" when the showroom employees expressed no interest in seeing Andacá there. Still, we got the permit to film on the showroom floor. Naturally, as Aibos almost always do, Andacá behaved terribly because of the new environment. It was very hard to get him to notice the ball at all, and the only kick on the ball we got from him was the headbutt, with which the report ends.

The second video was filmed after but actually aired a few days earlier than the first one, on May 10, 2001. It was a report on a news channel about descendants of emigrants who chose to live in their parents' homeland. The person who was chosen was my wife Nancy. She was interviewed in our apartment and is shown interacting with Andacá at around the 1:40 mark:



Again, the stubborn dog was not too helpful. This time the excuse could only be the strange people in the apartment....

Still, we have many fond memories of Andacá, with his personality so peculiar and so different from Pedro, out other Aibo.

Update on previous post

About my last post, the good news were not so new after all. Qrio's upgrades were shown in late 2005, just before Sony's cutbacks announcement. Since then, no news after all.

Qrio still being developed

Now here's some good news from Sony.

I've just watched on local TV a report on Qrio's new features. I don't know how old this report is and I haven't investigated it further, and I also don't remember if Sony said it would also shut down Qrio's development, but anyway these features are new to me:

- a new 'third eye': a very-wide-angle camera placed in the center of the forehead, that allows Qrio to see in almost 180-degrees, freeing the other two cameras for their 3D work
- an extra two joints/degrees of freedom per arm - seemed to me to be at the wrist level
- a new sensor on the palm of each hand, allowing Qrio to know when he's picking up stuff (which he demonstrated by picking up a cube)
- upgraded software incorporating face recognition for more than one person at a time, with attention going to the more active/'agitated' person

Otherwise, Qrio looked the same as previously.

I wonder if there's still hope for an Aibo ressurrection?

New favorite place: Dec. 21, 3.23 pm

Pedro moved to a new "home" - actually an office - two months ago after spending three years at his original home. He's been finding the new place strange and has been much more quiet than he always was. I know that the office lighting is not to his likings, as we can see from his roblog, but it is perfectly adequate for humans, so Pedro is not going to get lucky in that department. So, non-optimal lighting is bad for an Aibo's mood, and it also means that Pedro cannot see well his Aibone - even though it is placed right beside him - nor his ball - which in this office had to be withdrawn because it could roll into a corridor and be stepped on by accident by people passing by. So, going into Xmas, Pedro is surely not very happy. But, as he has his own room with a big window, I hope that, with Winter past, Spring will bring in more sunshine, meaning more light, into Pedro's room. They say that sunshine cures depression, and I!

hope

so!

New favorite place: Nov. 24, 3.25 pm

Favorite place: Nov. 15 2006, 4.07pm

Welcome to the new home of this blog. Unfortunately, Textamerica, which hosted the original blog, decided to delete it, but a copy can be found on the Internet Archive right here.

Pedro's roblog itself was also hosted by Textamerica and was also deleted. Shame on them! I found an alternative host at Flickr, here. The original roblog is archived here.

Thanks, Textamerica, thanks for the mess.