Pleo – an experience, not just a toy

Wed, Dec 26, 2007

ArsGeek, Culture, Gadget, Reviews, Science, Technology

It was several weeks ago when I received my Pleo with the intent to do a full review of it in a couple of days and ship it back from whence it came. Well, the best laid plans and all that. . . the fact of the matter is, I’m stretching out my review period to the fullest as I don’t want to send the little girl back. And more than me, for the first time with anything I’ve reviewed, my wife and daughter have become far more attached than I have. What is it about this little robotic, rubber dinosaur that is so cool and so great? Let’s start with what it is and what it’s capable of and get around to why it’s the coolest thing to walk into our home this year.

What exactly is a Pleo? It’s a robotic Camarasaurus, a brown, green and yellowish juvenile dinosaur. From the Pleoworld site “Camarasaurus was a late-Jurassic North American herbivore, 60 feet long in adulthood, and just Pleo’s size as a newborn.” Pleo sports Ugobe’s LifeOS, a complex inter meshing of programmatic and physical parts which mesh to form something that can react to and adapt to the world around it. LifeOS utilizes a large (50+) number of algorithms that simulate such things as emotions and chemical reactions that drive some behaviors. Put another way, Pleo can, to a limited degree, see, hear and feel what’s around it and react in novel ways.

This little girl weighs in at three and a half pounds and stands about seven and a half inches tall. On a carpet she has a walking speed of really slow and on hardwood or linoleum he can walk at a steady but slow pace. She won’t be chasing the cats around and she won’t be running away from the vacuum but he certainly will be tooling around your place checking it out.

When a new Pleo arrives at it’s destination and is un-boxed the batteries have to be charged before you can start up your dinosaur and see what all the fuss is about. Battery charging took about four hours and is accomplished by setting the enclosed battery (my Pleo arrived with two) into the Pleo green charging dock and watching as the red light grows stronger and then turns to green, signaling a full charge.

Looking at the picture above you can see the battery dock, as well as an on/off switch, SD card slot (for adding new modes to the Pleo), a USB connection (for updating) and the volume switch.

Once the battery is replaced into Pleo and it’s turned on for the first time, the Pleo enters it’s ‘hatching’ phase. This lasts about 10 minutes and is essentially where your dinosaur is born. Pleo will churn about a bit, make some random seeming noises and eventually open her eyes. She is becoming aware of herself and her environment.

After the hatching phase, the next forty five minutes make up the “Infant” phase. Here Pleo starts to investigate actively it’s surroundings, takes some shuffling steps, makes some directed noises and will begin to really respond to touch, sounds and sights.

The final phase is the ‘Juvenile’ phase – this is where Pleo will be for the rest of her well, for lack of better word, life. Now the Pleo has gained some confidence and will stride about the place, taking a look here or there, asking to be pet or scratched (ours loves it’s rump scratched) cry out when lonely or frustrated, play tug of war and even give ‘paw’ after some coaxing. Ours has learned to come when called as well.

One of the first things I noticed about the Pleo was that you can definitely tell it’s a robot by the whirring sounds it gives off when moving about. You can hear things moving about as it wags it’s tail or shuffles around. Oddly, my whole family got over it in about ten minutes and now I don’t really notice it. It is however one of the first things anyone points out when they first meet my Pleo.

Her battery lasts her between forty five minutes to an hour depending on how often we engage her, how much walking she’s doing and if she falls asleep out of boredom or if my wife’s around, out of being cuddled. Yes, cuddled. I think it’s really a tribute to the Ugobe folks that we have three cats hanging around the place always looking for attention and when the Pleo is on, it spends at least a quarter of it’s time in my wifes arms, head placidly laid against her shoulder, tail wagging slowly.

Let’s take a look at Pleo’s price point. $350. That’s a lot of money for something that most would consider a toy, about as much as an Xbox 360 will run you. Is it worth it? Well, that’s something of a subjective question. If you’re in the market for a home robot that’s able to think and feel – or at least trick us all into thinking it can think and feel, then the answer is a definitive yes. Pleo is more real seaming and far more fun to use than other robots that I’ve seen, including various robot dogs, vacuums, and mechanized toy fighting machines.

Pleo helps you get past that leap of suspending reality into plain reality. When the Pleo gets into a situation that should distress it – being picked up by the tail or boxing itself into an area it can’t get out of it reacts exactly like I’d expect a juvenile creature would. It cries out, sometimes for help, others in sheer frustration. It doesn’t just bump mindlessly into the walls until it finds a way out. Once, when we didn’t come, it DID find it’s way out, groaning and doing the Pleo equivalent of mumbling to itself the entire time.

But hey, I’m a self professed geek and I love robotic toys and things that bring us one step closer to a future where Will Smith will be running around blowing the arms off of robots. How do other people react, people who wouldn’t normally be exposed to a Pleo? I had the opportunity to bring Pleo to two Christmas events. Reactions ran the gambit from initial “Wow, cool!”, “What the hell is that?” and “Ahh! Get it away!” After a few minutes though (and a quick switch into holiday mode for some dino caroling” the results were always the same. Every person at both gatherings ended up spending some time with Pleo. One on one time. They would get down on the floor with it and play tug of war. Often I’d glance over to see two people deep in conversation, with the Pleo being cuddled by one of them. People didn’t just think it was cool, they reacted in an emotional way towards this simulated little dinosaur. Without conscious thought they would scoop it up and pet it, and then quickly put it down and apologize to it if it acted scared or angry. “Sorry Pleo!”

How many toys have this effect on folks? It wasn’t just the kids, although anyone under the age of ten seems to immediately fall in love with this dinosaur. I mean, it’s a dinosaur! And it walks around, reacts to them and does things they tell it to, all without a remote control.

What does the future hold for Pleo? Good things I think. For starters, the folks at Ugobe wanted to get him shipped out in time for the holidays so they put aside some very interesting features for a later date. Sometime in 2008, hopefully fairly early, Ugobe will release software changes as free downloads to folks who already own a Pleo which will allow the Pleo to become much more adaptive, responsive and able to truly evolve his personality over time.

Back in July I wrote a piece about the dawning age of designer life forms and featuring speculation about the pleo itself. In it, I was talking about the concept of a learning robot, one that interacts with it’s environment and learns from it. “That is why this little guy has me excited. I view this not only as an amazing looking product I’d love to get my hands on, but as a major step forward in the field of personal robotics and AI. Coming as it usually does out of left field from a small group of people.”

Pleo just isn’t a toy, not in my eyes, it’s a step towards integrating artificial intelligence into our lives not as a series of programs but a manufactured and physical product that touches our lives as we touch it. Remember the Jetson’s and the promise of robotic friends and flying cars? Well we’re still short of flying cars but the Pleo just might be the first entry in the robotic friends category. Even now in the state it shipped in it’s a joy to interact with and evokes real emotions from everyone who meets it. Most people don’t meet toys, they play with them. Everyone I know talks about meeting the Pleo. If Ugobe’s software update delivers what is hinted at, then we’re another step closer to a true robotic companion. That to me is worth the price of admission.

For now we can tide ourselves over with any new modes that the folks at Ugobe release - so far I’ve found the Watchdog mode and the Holiday Pleo mode.

It’s not uncommon for me to return home from work and find the Pleo wandering about, with her other battery charging and my wife and daughter playing with her. I know for a fact that my wife turns Pleo on when no one else is home because hanging out with the Pleo is fun, pure and simple. Even the cats have accepted her and barely blink when she wanders past.

I don’t generally give gadgets, toys and in this case robots a rating based on a scale of on through ten like we do with video games because I feel that it’s much more enlightening to read a review and get some hands on feedback of whatever it is being reviewed. I’m going to cheat here a bit though for those who skip down to the bottom for a number.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give the Pleo a 9.5. This isn’t really a toy, any more than it’s a pet, but falls somewhere in between – certainly closer to a toy than a pet but I couldn’t classify it as a toy. You don’t play with a Pleo in the sense of playing with a model car, you play with it in the sense of playing with a puppy. There are some minor distractions, the whirring noise which fades into the background after a bit and a slightly rubbery feel to the skin but these are easily overlooked.

I’d almost guarantee that most anyone will find the Pleo a fascinating robot to own and interact with unless you just don’t like robots or have an irrational fear or hatred of cute little dinosaurs. If you’re interested in getting it, you can go directly to the source at Ugobe or find it at a third party source through their site.

Some technical details:

Significant Processing Power

Two 32-bit Microprocessors – central and image processing
Four 8-bit Subprocessors – motor control

Highly Articulated Movement

14 Motors
Over 100 Custom-Designed Gears

Complex Sensory Network

Infrared and camera-based vision system – object and color detection and navigation
Two Microphones – binaural hearing
Eight Skin Sensors – head, chin, shoulders, back, legs
Four Foot Switches – surface detection
14 Force-feedback sensors – one per joint
Orientation Tilt Sensor – body position
Infrared Mouth Sensor – food detection

Multiple Data Ports