
Sony’s New Toio Wants to Inspire a Future Generation of Robotics Engineers - infodroid
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2017/06/02/sony-toio-robotics-engineers/
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sunstone
When you see Boston Dynamics being passed around like a cheap keg of wine you
have to wonder what the upside is for robotics engineers vs. say, search
engineers.

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hugs
Over the last several years I stumbled into a killer app for robotics:
testing. Almost every manufacturer of any thing has a secret testing lab of
robots (and engineers to program them). Robotics are good for dealing with
dangerous things (like welding or bomb disposal) and those bots get most of
the attention. But robots are also great for "boring", tedious things, like
tapping buttons for 12 hours straight. Yet those robots don't get as much
attention because, well, watching button tapping is slightly boring, and more
importantly, many companies want to keep their quality control (and
manufacturing) robotic processes a trade secret. Thus, most people have no
idea how prevalent robots really are beyond flashy Boston Dynamics videos.

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icefox
Best part is that your boss doesn't blink when you ask him to approve legos
sets and lego boxes bought by the pound to build the boring tapping, sliding,
dropping, shaking robot of the week that they need.

Edit: second best part is take your kid to work day when you get to show the 8
year olds your cabinets full of spare lego parts.

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lovemenot
It looks like Sony does not plan to sell these outside of Japan, at least at
launch.

I'd be happy to ship a few from Japan (at a small mark-up), if there's
interest.

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malux85
Count me in!

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lovemenot
I just did some investigation. The first batch seems to be sold out, after a
TV segment featured Toio a couple days ago. Pre-orders are now for November
delivery.

Still interested?

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zerotwozero
Yes, I be interested in having it shipped to the UK. Keep me posted with any
plans and updates.

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lovemenot
It looks like up to four people are interested. Send an email (address in
profile), and we'll proceed from there.

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theprop
There are actually lots of companies building robotics toys for kids and
inspiring a new generation of Robotics Engineers :-D!

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hugs
I was that kid in the 80s that played with robotics toys. (My favorite was the
Armatron from Radio Shack). When I grew up, I was somewhat disappointed to see
that the biggest opportunity in robotics was to make robotics toys to inspire
the next generation. These days I make robots that solve real business
problems. However, there is an obvious and tempting market for selling them as
entertainment/education robots instead. But I'm deliberately trying to make
real robots that solve real problems. Sometimes, though, I feel that people
are more interested in "useless" robots.

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watwut
Isn't robotics basically just one cool sounding application of
microelectronics and mechanics?

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codyb
Certainly but that's like saying the cloud is just a cool sounding application
of multicore processors. It is, but it leaves out the several very deep
software engineering fields of machine learning, networking, and programming
as well as the fields of UX/UI design, and quite possibly a whole slew of
human behavioral fields.

