You’ve always wanted to have a dog of your own. But you haven’t been able to have one, either because you don’t want to be bothered with picking up after it or where you’re living doesn’t allow you to actually have pets. Well, Sony has the solution for people like you, if you live in Japan or you have someone who can buy stuff for you over there. After 10 years of being put to sleep, so to speak, aibo, the robot pet is back and now supposedly more intelligent than ever.
There are reasons why people would want to have pets around. But if your reason is to have someone fun to play with and to create an emotion bond with, aibo is something you can consider. That is, if you don’t mind having a bond with something metallic and that runs on artificial intelligence. Sony says your robot dog will give you “love, affection, and the joy of nurturing and raising a companion.” It has two OLED panels in its eyes so it can show a variety of expressions. It can run on 22 axes because of its ultra-compact actuators.
Because of Sony’s deep learning technology, the curious little aibo will seek out its owners and respond to praise, smiles, head and back scratches and various other things that humans usually do with pets. The more you interact with it, the more its behavior will change and adapt to you, using Sony’s “unique AI technology”. aibo collects data from its interactions with you, connect with the cloud and then access these data and adapt its behavior accordingly.
Aside from the aibo Entertainment dog, which will cost you around $1,800 (198,000 yen), you will also have to subscribe to the aibo Basic Plan to access its artificial intelligence technology. It will cost around $26 per month or $790 per year. Pre-orders start on November 1 through the Sony Store and shipping starts January 2018. For now, the aibo robot dog will only be available in Japan, so if you’ve been dreaming of this and you’re not freaked out at all over having a robotic dog follow you around, you will have to go to Japan to get one.
SOURCE: Sony
