I-Cybie Review: I-Cybie robotic pet is manufactured by Silverlit Electronics and commercialized worldwide by several toy vendors. It comes in three colors: blue, gold and transparent cover. This pet robot is quite close to a Sony Aibo in terms of form factor, usage and features. The robotic dog is made of 1400 parts and 90 feet of wire. It has an onboard computer and responds to its environment with canine-like moods. For example, he becomes sad if you ignore him… This robot is endowed with voice recognition, behavior development, sound sensors, obstacle detection, dynamic drive, orientation sensors, touch pet sensors, and communication with I-Cybie is possible also using an IR remote, clap commands, and voice commands.
I-Cybie is able to wander arround without trouble. He can detect obstacle and avoid them with no problem. Even is you make he fall down, he can recover gracely. His sensors detect his position, so he knows when and how to move to stand up again.
The robot has four main emotional states: happy, hyper, sad, and sleepy. Depending on the mood the dog shows a different behavior and decides to obey or not… The emotional state of the dog is caused by your interaction with the pet and the environment. For example, a quite and dark room can make I-Cybie to feel sad.
I-Cybies can also do some tricks for your entertainment and amusement. For example, he can give paw, dance, or scracth ear. It also can be trained to recognise you voice, so you can tell him to do a trick if you want.
A walk-up charger is also available. If you have it, I-Cybie is able to autonomously look for the wall charger when he feels tired (battery low) and re-charge by himself.
Programming the robot is also possible. However, a hardware hack is required in order to be able to program I-Cybie using C language. A so-called Super I-Cybie upgrade is needed. An SDK for development is also available. See the following links for details on programming and SDK:
http://www.aibohack.com/icybie/index.html
http://www.deep-shadows.com/hax/i-cybie.htm
The following picture shows I-Cybie gold sharing table with some Aibo friends, so you can compare sizes and playing cards capabilities:
Manual and Guide are available from the following links:
Instruction Guide (English): http://www.i-cybie.com/downloads/Instruction/EIG.pdf
Quick Stard Card (English): http://www.i-cybie.com/downloads/QuickCard/EQSC.pdf
