The fine folks at Ugobe are toiling away on their much-touted but still relevant autonomous dinosaur, Pleo.

For those of you not paying attention in the back, Pleo is a robotic baby Camarasaurus which has more sensors on its head, feet, nose, eyes, tail than the real one probably did. It can take pictures, look at stuff, respond to things, and learn. You know, your basic autonomous robot dinosaur fare.

A happy-making approach that Ugobe is taking is to make the robot hackable, principally by including an SD and USB port. This should make it way more interesting and interactive to Maker-types.

What’s more encouraging is that it should also spark the imaginations of people who might not have really *played* with their toys otherwise.

The particular dead chevaline we like to beat here is the fact that Sony’s Aibo wasn’t marketed as hackable, or as having any exciting capabilities other than as a novelty toy. We firmly believe that this lead to the Aibo’s long and painful decline and demise.

Sci Fi Tech has some nifty video of the baby dino in action (Although you do need to sit through a commercial).

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 3:50 pm and is filed under RoboToys, This Is So Blade Runner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.