Sony AIBO
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An Aibo.
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| Manufacturer | Sony Corporation |
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| Inventor | SONY's Digital Creatures Lab and Toshitada Doi |
| Country | Japan |
| Year of creation | 1999 |
| Type | Dog |
| Purpose | Entertainment |
| Website | http://aibo.com |
AIBO (stylized aibo, Artificial Intelligence Robot, homonymous with aibō (), "pal" or "partner" in Japanese) is a series of robotic pets designed and manufactured by Sony. Sony announced a prototype Aibo in mid-1998. The first consumer model was introduced on May 11, 1999. New models were released every year until 2006. Although most models were dog-like, other inspirations included lion-cubs and space explorer, and only the ERS-7 version and ERS-1000 versions was explicitly a "robotic dog".
In 2006, AIBO was added into the Carnegie Mellon University Robot Hall of Fame.
On January 26, 2006 Sony announced that it would discontinue AIBO and several other products in an effort to make the company more profitable. Sony's AIBO customer support was withdrawn gradually, with support for the final ERS-7M3 ending in March 2013. However it is rumoured that Sony will reboot the campaign in 2019, however this time making robotic cats instead of dogs as this is suggested by many people.
In July 2014, Sony stopped providing repairs for AIBO products and did not provide customer support or repair for AIBO robots.
In November 2017, Sony announced a new generation of AIBO after 11 years. The fourth generation model, ERS-1000, was launched in Japan on 11 January 2018. The second lottery sale was set on 6 February 2018 at 14:59.
AIBO grew out of Sony's Computer Science Laboratory (CSL). Founded in 1990, CSL was set up to emulate the famed innovation center at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). CSL's first product was the Aperios operating system, later to form the base software some AIBO models used. When Nobuyuki Idei became president of Sony in 1995, he sought to adopt a digital agenda, reflected in the new motto he gave the company, “Digital Dream Kids,” and the prominence he gave to CSL.
Famed engineer Dr. Toshitada Doi is credited as AIBO’s original progenitor: in 1994 he had started work on robots with artificial intelligence expert Masahiro Fujita within CSL. Fujita would write that the robot's behaviors will need to “be sufficiently complex or unexpected so that people keep an interest in watching or taking care of it”. Fujita argued that entertainment robots might be viable as "A robot for entertainment can be effectively designed using various state-of-the-art technologies, such as speech recognition and vision, even though these technologies may not be mature enough for applications where they perform a critical function. While there exists special and difficult requirements in entertainment applications themselves, limited capabilities in the speech and vision systems may turn out to be an interesting and attractive feature for appropriately designed entertainment robots." His early monkey-like prototype "MUTANT" included behaviors that would become part of AIBOs including tracking a yellow ball, shaking hands, karate strikes and sleeping. Fujita would later receive the IEEE Inaba Technical Award for Innovation Leading to Production for "AIBO, the world's first mass-market consumer robot for entertainment applications".
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