pleo - part pet, part robot

There is a new toy in city, Pleo brought to you by Ugobe. This company's inventor and co-framer is Caleb Chung, the same guy who co-invented the Furby 1n 1998. Pleo has 14 motors and six processors (Furby had one of each), a nose-mounted camera and 30 sensors. It's irascible to touch, noise, movement, and even other Pleos.

Pleo is a fetching one week old baby Camarasaurus, a gentle and loving gear eating dinosaur from the late Jurassic Age of our planet’s history. Ugobe old and researched actual Camarasaurus fossil records to domestics them model Pleo’s appearance and behavior. (provenience)
The news releases started in 2005, with its much-delayed manumit happening on December 18, 2007. This robotic pet costs $349, but reported owners seem to think its worth it. People are obsessed with these! There are Pleo videos, songs, skits.... owners can even keep a Plog about their robotic pet.

In this Walk 13th, 2008 Nightline episode, newscasters describe Pleo as "straddl[ing] the diagonal between pet and product."



You can get a tour of the Ugobe labs, in this first webisode in the Ugobe series of videos titled "Behind The Scenes: The Making of Pleo."

You can see the still of the videos in this 6 video series by visiting the website.

Pleo is based on the three laws of Ugobe duration forms.

The life form should...
1. ... handle and convey emotions
2. ... become aware of itself and its habitat
3. ... learn and develop over time

Isaac Asimov, who is credited for coining the word robotics in his short story Runaround published in 1942, also had his noted 3 laws of robotics (which Pleo appears to go):

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, consider a human being to come...