Submitted version of the thesis - Airlab, the Artificial Intelligence ...

18 Chapter 2. State of the Art
(a) Kismet (b) Furby (c) AIBO
(d) Spykee (e) Rovio
Figure 2.8: Robots developed for games and interactions
The domestically-aimed robots become popular in the market. One of them
is Spykee (Figure 2.8(d)), which is a robotic toy made by Meccano in 2008.
It contains a USB webcam, microphone and speakers. Controlled by computer
locally or over the internet, the owner can move the robot to various
locations within range of the local router, take pictures and video, listen to
surroundings with the on-board microphone and play sounds/music or various
built-in recordings (Robot laugh, laser guns, etc.) through the speaker.
Spykee has a WiFi connectivity to let him access the Internet using both
ad-hoc and infrastructure modes.
Similar to Spykee, with different kinematics models and more improvements,
Rovio TM (Figure 2.8(e)) is the groundbreaking new Wi-Fi enabled
mobile webcam that views and interacts with its environment through video
and audio streaming.
Accordingtoourgoals, weinvestigated thepreviouslymaderobots, since
we thought we could benefit from the techniques used. Furbies have expressions,
but they don’t move. While Rovio has omnidirectional, Spykee has
tracks for the motion, but they lack entertainment. AIBO has legs and a