By CrunchGear, on 2009.11.26, 08:41.06 am
As a huge conglomerate, NEC is active in a lot of areas. But unknown to many people outside Japan, the company is quite aggressive in the robotics field, too. Their PaPeRo, a cute helper robot, for example, has been around since 1997 already. And now, just in time for a robot exhibition that currently takes place in Tokyo, the company shows an updated version of the little guy.
The new PaPerRo R500 stands 38cm tall and weighs 6.5kg. It can perform about 200 different operations, for example holding simple conversations with humans. NEC equipped the robot with special face recognition software so that PaPeRo can identify up to 30 different people and change his behavior depending on who he’s speaking to.
Powered by a lithium-ion battery, PaPeRo can work for around 100 minutes before having to return to the recharging station, which you can see on the picture above (he does this automatically).
NEC plans to lease out the robots to anyone interested for $600 per month soon – but only in Japan.
Via Robot Watch [JP]
By CrunchGear, on 2009.10.27, 11:00.22 am
Robots now enter the agriculture industry, too. First the award-winning rice-transplanting robot, now this: Major Japanese conglomerate Fuji Heavy Industries has developed an agricultural robot that can tend fields autonomously.
The company says the robot is the first of its kind. It runs on gas and is 2m long, 60cm wide and 1m high. It emits and receives laser signals to orient itself, gauging the distance to special reflective plates (which are placed at regular intervals of about 10 meters).
Fuji Heavy says the robot can grow fruit and vegetables independently, and it can even be used inside greenhouses. The company plans to start selling the machine next fiscal year for around $100,000. My apologies for the small picture, but that’s all that’s available now.
Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]
By Neowin, on 2009.06.29, 07:41.12 am
A large conglomerate of mega corps has backed the European Commission to support a standard of micro-USB connection for charging. The biggest surprise here is that Apple is joining in the support which means that they too will also adopt micro-USB for charging in their wireless devices. For any other company this wouldn't mean much but because Apple has used the same port design since its iPod inception this could have a wide scale affect on its consumers. Imagine that you bought an iPhone, a Bose radio with an iPod dock connector, your car has built in support for the connection and Apple changes its port design and all of your devices become incompatible with future products.
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