Skype Robot Demonstration with WowWee Roboquad - Video

Watch me control a WowWee Roboquad robot that is spying on my home, using just my voice from across the Internet, thanks to Skype's free video call service. Sneak preview video for Robodance Version 4, due out at the end of November 2007. For more information visit: http://www.robodance.com/

What to Do When Rover Resents Roomba

ParticularlyRobotics, consumer, Hardware Wade Roush wrote:

When I got an iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner a few years ago, my dog’s first counteraction was mild curiosity, followed by unalloyed disinterest. He was clearly intelligent enough to take that the gadget wasn’t lively—and that therefore it wasn’t a rival or a presage. Alas, some people’s dogs decent aren’t as smart. An article in today’s Try Street Journal takes a lighthearted look at the frictions that, superficially, are all too common between real pets and robotic ones, extraordinarily the Roomba.

Nancy Dussault Smith, a spokeswoman at Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), told the Magazine that the subject of animal-robot relations “comes up constantly” at the companionship. “Dogs, cats, all animals, they have their own personalities, so they reply differently to the robots,” she said. The controversy is so common, she said, that iRobot has built protection features into the Roomba line to disable the android if a pet flips it over or sits on it.

If your dog just can’t get along with your cat's-paw vacuum, the Journal has a suggestion: acquaint someone with something the robot “bad Roomba” in front of your dog. After one irrational confrontation, such a scolding calmed down Argos, a dog connection to San Carlos, CA, software engineer Keith Hearn, according to the article.

The Annual piece includes a pointer to this pleasant YouTube video showing a puppy fa off with a Roboquad toy robot from WowWee Robotics. And the paper’s website excerpted the YouTube video in the following video from gentleman Adam Najberg:

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