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Technology Lifestyle The robots are coming - to a store near you!
Technology Lifestyle The robots are coming - to a store near you! | The robots are coming - to a store near you! |
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| Written by Stuart Corner | |
| Monday, 31 December 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 2 According to ABI Research, the entertainment robotics market saw blips like the low-cost Furby in the late 90s and the expensive AIBO in the early 2000s, and is now dominated by WowWee, but "The emerging Ugobe (with its Pleo pet dinosaur robot) stands out for its unique balance of complexity and cost." Pleo is a cute baby dinosaur whose mechanics are hidden under a plastic skin making him took more like a three-dimensional cartoon character than a machine. Pleo's web site has videos of people cuddling and cooing over Pleo as they would a real life kitten or puppy. He sells for $US349 but has been so popular in the US this Christmas that, according to Ugobe's web site, orders placed now won't be filled until the end of January. Down the track, ABI says that standardised efforts around several integral operating systems are starting to replace proprietary efforts in the commercial robotics space, and these should trickle down to personal robots. "The personal robotics market will continue to see major advances at affordable consumer prices. This presents additional revenue opportunities for a wide variety of companies, including small robotics-focused software companies, microcontroller vendors, as well as larger semiconductor vendors, behemoths like Intel and Microsoft, and giant automotive manufacturers." Even longer term ABI predicts a reversal of the trend to falling prices. According to Solis, "average selling prices will climb higher and higher towards a point in the future when some people may spend as much on a multi-task humanoid robot as they do on a car, buying fewer, but more expensive, robots. This scenario will occur well in the future, but as we reach 2015, we can expect to see an increasing use of complex manipulators."{moscomment}
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