Get ready to say ?hello? to Jimmy, Pepper and Jibo.
The first wave of truly social companion robots for the average family is coming soon to a store ? virtual or otherwise ? near you?in 2015.
These new-gen social robots are designed to be live-in members of the family, interacting and responding to human cues.
Jimmy
First to market will be Jimmy, a product of Intel and Trossen Robotics.
Jimmy is a 27-inch high, 13.2-pound open-sourced 3D-printed robot that is powered by Intel?s new Edison Internet of Things (IoT) chip. It has a price tag of $1,600 for a developer starter kit that covers the non-3D printable parts such as the motors and processors.
Jimmy is the brainchild of Intel futurist and principal engineer Brian David Johnson and a team of company researchers and engineers known as Intel?s 21st Century Robot Initiative.
?What?s so exciting about the open source model is the public gets involved in developing this first generation of crowd-sourced, consumer robots. We all get a say in what they do, and together we come up with far more ideas, more innovation, and more creativity,? said Johnson on the Intel website.
Johnson has said Jimmy is designed to be created on a 3D printer and programmed with downloadable files that the end user can customize however they desire. Only 50 beta versions of the Jimmy robot developer kits are being made available for purchase at: www.21stCenturyRobot.com, with a targeted delivery date of January 2015.
?The idea of Jimmy?and all subsequent robots that developers decide to build on it?is for it to be social and go off and interact with other people and with other robots,? said Johnson at a recent conference.
Johnson wanted Jimmy to be based on open source technology to make it easy for non-programmers to build with robotic apps as easy to design as those for smartphones. He wants everybody to be able to create their own robot and give it a name.
A spokesperson for Intel said the company is not currently answering any questions related to projected sales for Jimmy or making any Intel personnel available for interviews.
Pepper
Pepper, said to be the first personal robot that can read human emotions, is the creation of Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank. Introduced this past June, it will go on sale exclusively in Japan in February 2015 at a price of $1,900.
The four-foot high, 62-pound humanoid robot with a 12-hour battery life takes his surroundings into consideration to react pro-actively using proprietary algorithms to analyze expressions and voice tones, allowing it to respond to humans in a natural way.
Pepper has a 10-inch display and employs four microphones, two cameras and a Wi-Fi connection. A cloud database stores past human interactions, allowing it, over time, to learn from past mistakes.
?Our goal is to have Pepper in many homes communicating and interacting to make people happy,? said SoftBank spokesperson Yusuke Abe.
SoftBank said Pepper can make jokes, dance and amuse people through a variety of entertainment capabilities that allow it to evolve by learning through interactions with people.
The company has not announced a specific unit sales target.
Initially available only in Japan, SoftBank Robotics CEO Fumihide Tomizawa has previously stated that Pepper will be sold at Sprint stores in the U.S. by the end of summer after gathering data from its Japan sales. Following trial sales in Japan, SoftBank has a base of 2,600 retail stores from which to launch broader sales of Pepper.
Masayoshi Son, chairman and chief executive of SoftBank (9984:JP), acquired controlling interest in Sprint in 2013 for $22 billion.
SoftBank Robotics was established as a subsidiary in July 2014 to oversee Pepper.
While SoftBank has acknowledged it has priced Pepper deliberately low to develop a market for it, the company said it expects to generate revenue through applications and original content as customers personalize their robots.
Pepper, manufactured by Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., went on display at some of SoftBank?s Tokyo-area shops in June but will debut with Japanese retail customers in February.
Bruno Maisonnier, chief executive of Aldebaran, SoftBank?s French company developing the Pepper, expects to sell ?millions? of the machines, he told Bloomberg News in June. ?We?re betting that a huge number of people will buy the robots.?
Jibo
Also due out in late 2015 is Weston, MA-based Jibo Inc.?s self-named Jibo, which the company calls the world?s first family robot. Unlike the mobile Pepper, Jibo is an armless, 11-inch, six-pound table-bound robot.
Founded in late 2012, the company has $5 million in venture funding from CRV and Fairhaven Capital and was created by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, founder and director of the Personal Robots Group at MIT?s Media Lab.
?What if technology helps you like a partner rather than simply being a tool? That?s what Jibo is about,? said Breazeal in the promotional piece for Jibo on the Indiegogo crowdfunding site.
Earlier this year, Jibo completed the most successful technology campaign ever on Indiegogo, raising more than $2.2 million from more than 5,500 supporters. Customers were able to pre-order the robot for $499, or $599 for the developer edition, for shipping by December 2015.
More than 4,800 Jibos were pre-ordered, 28 percent of which were developer editions and upgrades. The company plans a full public release in the summer of 2016.
Jibo spokesperson Casey Pechan said the company currently does not yet have a target goal on how many units it would like to sell.
?Right now, we are working on developing Jibos for our early adapters. However, we have been blown away by the consumer interest we?ve seen thus far and we will determine more concrete goals later on,? said Pechan.
Currently, Jibo is available only through the Jibo website.
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