Robotic Cats – Maintenance Free Pets
Welcome back!
For those who have longed to own a cat but have allergies, or simply don’t want the fuss and muss of maintenance, Philips Electronics has the perfect answer — the iCat.
iCat is a plug & play desktop user-interface robot controlled by a PC — laptop or desktop — via a USB connection, capable of mechanically animated facial expressions. It can interact with people in a natural manner by understanding verbal requests, answering with replies, recognizing faces or objects and by using body language such as facial expressions, nodding and other head movements.
The robot is 15 inches (38 centimeters) tall and equipped with 13 servos that control different parts of the face, such as the eyebrows, eyes, eyelids, mouth and head position. With this setup iCat can generate many different facial expressions – happy, surprise, angry, sad – that are needed to create social human-robot interaction dialogues.
iCat — available by Philips Research in Eindhoven, Netherlands — was designed for studying human-robot interaction; in particular, to stimulate research such as social robotics, human-robot relationship, gaming, and ambient intelligence.
It features capacitive touch sensors located in the feet and ears, a USB webcam in the nose, a USB stereo soundcard and loudspeaker in feet, and a mini jack plug for the speaker for connecting external microphones.
Marcel Heerink, of the Institute for Information Engineering, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, Netherlands, performed a presentation demonstrating their studies using the iCat for human-robot interaction in nursing homes for the elderly on user’s attitude towards and acceptance of the robot.
Results showed that participants who were confronted with the more socially communicative version of the robot felt more comfortable and were more expressive in communicating with it. However, the findings didn’t show a significant correlation between perceived social abilities and technology acceptance.
Companion Robots
The iCat can play a very important role to assist in loneliness prevention. Especially for people with dementia, companion robots need to be trustworthy.
Future endeavors could include playback audio, photo and video content from multiple sources such as PCs, Internet or other storage devices.
iCat Robot Playing Tic-Tac-Toe
The iCat robot can play games, and even tells jokes to cheer up losing opponents.
It can detect any gaming instantly if the user attempts to trick it.
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I’d much rather have the USB dog. Real dogs have a lot more personality. You suppose the same is true for PC driven pets?
Hm … it seems to look more akin to a monkey than a cat. Perhaps whiskers are needed, and a narrower mouth … and slit eyes …
–Mike
[...] Robotic Cats – Maintenance Free Pets fastfastlane – member blog: Life in the Fast Lane created 9 hours, 45 minutes ago For those who have longed to own a cat but have allergies, or simply don’t want the fuss and muss of maintenance, Philips Electronics has the perfect answer — the iCat. iCat is a plug & play desktop user-interface robot controlled b tags: bizarre cat cats icat odd pets robot robots science unusual weird weird science [edit] Comments: BZ: add comment ↓dump [...]
This idea might have some merit but this is such bad execution: that thing doesn’t seem anything like a cat. For a real cool cat gizmo see the amazing CatCam
well, this is great for those who can not enjoy the love of a pet , however, it certainly is not the same….feel bad for those who can not enjoy the love of a pet, even though they are alot of work!…they are worth it for sure
Mark, I’m with you, I’m a dog person myself. These robots are completely programmable for their personalities. They even have a forum for people that purchase them for assistance. But they’re not open to the general mass, it’s more for people / companies wanting to do research at the moment.
Michael, that’s a great idea to add whiskers etc to make it more in the image of a feline. I agree with you, it’s mouth is rather odd, but it is interesting.
Thanks for the tip John, I’ll have a boo at it
I couldn’t have said it better Darlene. It’s sad what they’re missing out on, it’s an incredible gift to have pets.
Hi Deborah,
Yours is a great page to visit. Nice write ups.
Which country are you from?
Thanks & REgards,
Arunoday
Thanks Arunoday
I like your blog as well.
I’m from Canada…Edmonton, Alberta.
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Hi! Thank you for visiting me! You have a great blog here, and I really should have one of these cats. My landlord wont allow pets, but I guess he couldn’t complain about one of those! LOL! I was just visiting in Edmonton at the end of May – what an awesome place you live in!
Thanks Hippy Chic
Wow, what a coincidence! Do you have family or friends here?
I may tend to take things for granted considering I’ve lived here all of my life, but I do enjoy it … one of the reasons I’ve never moved
I am not sure I would want a cat that communicates with me. The looks of disdain my cat gives me if I talk to her when she is not interested in responding would be surely be accompanied by “leave me alone, you lowly human” or “only speak when you are spoken to”. I am sure she would phrase it in less polite terms though.
Haha, Sue, cats sure have a certain air of being ‘alpha’ don’t they?
Maybe get ‘your people’ to speak to ‘her people’ and you can come to some terms
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So what do we do when we realize our bank accounts have been wired to buy a lifetime supply of kitty treats? I don’t know about you guys, but my cat has never officially “talked” to me. At least not that anyone else can hear.
the best thing is you don’t have to pick up any of their poo!!!
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[...] Robotic Cats – Maintenance Free Pets – If you’re new here, you may want to Philips Electronics has the perfect answer the iCat. iCat is a plug & play desktop user-interface robot controlled by a PC laptop or desktop via a USB connection, capable of mechanically animated facial expressions. It can interact with people in a natural manner by understanding verbal requests, answering with replies, recognizing faces or objects and by using body language such as facial expressions, nodding and other head movements. [...]
[...] with his group of engineers, designers and programmers at his company Hanson Robotics, that creates robotic companions and social robots. The team brought Zeno for a demonstration to a group of students at the Wired [...]
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