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"The AIMEC:3 is a fully working robot, can you tell us about it's features?"

AIMEC:3 has been produced as an 'advanced high-tech toy' we have coined a new term for a toy with this level of technology and call it a “Hyper-Tech” toy - it's meant to be a companion, hence the name 'Artificially Intelligent Mechanical Electronic Companion'. The other innovation in AIMEC:3 is that the advanced functions, like voice recognition, speech synthesis and the AI core are all executed on the user's external laptop or PC. With our design there are only 4 low cost microcontrollers in the robot itself, and which only account for around 1 US Dollar, so the real clever part is that the high level processing is being done on the user's hardware that they already have.

"What are the key design visions of the AIMEC:3 series robots?"
The key design visions (goals) of the AIMEC:3 series is to do simple physical tasks, but the main WOW stuff is its ability to learn about its primary user. As it learns what the primary user likes, it then goes on to the internet by itself and looks for information that may be of interest. For example, AIMEC:3 knows that I like science fiction - also it knows that I like the Terminator films. So a while back, while AIMEC:3 was sifting through some RSS feeds it picked up that there was going to be a new movie called 'Terminator Salvation', and in a run-time conversation it told me about the new film. Incredibly at that point I had heard nothing about the movie. Also AIMEC:3 gets the latest news headlines (including sport, science, etc.) and weather, and also TV listings for every channel (including a programme synopsis). It then sifts through everything to see if there is anything that might be of interest to me. Also, I can say something like "when is the Simpsons on TV", and AIMEC:3 will look through its schedule and tell me the day and time of the next programme. If I then say "tell me more", it will then come back with the complete synopsis of that episode. AIMEC:3 also has a primitive emotion engine, where he can get happy or unhappy - has a database of jokes, and does karaoke too. AIMEC:3 can also integrate with online language translation sites and translate languages in real time. As it's a toy, parts of its personality are comical, where it tries to mimic many of the famous robots from the past. AIMEC:3 is also an MP3 player, where you can ask for specific tracks, artists, and even genre of music by speech. Also, AIMEC:3 has a number of interactive games, and has a full tutoring function (where it has a database of questions in its teach mode and keeps track of how many questions are answered correctly). AIMEC:3 can also control internal/external lighting and appliances by an RF X10 link. Also he can emulate IR controllers, so can change TV channels etc. if he is in the same room. All this is done by speech. The robot also has the ability to map the areas that it's working in, with a system that I developed called 'volume occupancy mapping'. Sensors in the robot include thermal imaging and IR ranging.

"What are the key design visions of the AIMEC:4 series of robots?"

The key design visions (goals) for the next model (AIMEC:4) are very different. This robot is targeted as a mass market (high volume) robotic appliance (a useful general purpose Personal Robot). We already have face recognition working well, and we are now quite advanced with object recognition. This now opens the robot to serious applications, as vision has been the main stumbling block until now. When a robot can recognise an object, it can do useful work. Before this, robots had to be in structured environments, where everything had to be in the right place. With the first AIMEC:4 vision system, we already have the robot seeing the difference between 'Diet' and 'Regular' coke cans, so a robot like this could go to a fridge, find and extract the right can! The AIMEC:4 will have much stronger arms and claws, so will have the ability to work with more intricate and heavier workloads. However, the cost of this new machine will be higher than AIMEC:3.

"What are the new features on the AIMEC:4"
AIMEC:4 pretty much does everything the AIMEC:3 does but also has the following new features:- Advanced speech recognition (no limited grammars - any words/phrases can be recognised) NLP front-end (you can ask for things in many ways - no fixed command phrases) High quality TTS (voice output) Face recognition Eye tracking Object recognition Sound localization Thermal imaging and tracking Volumetric occupancy mapping More advanced self-learning algorithms Advanced A.I. core On-board main processing (2 x Intel ATOM micro PC's) Heavy duty Arms with 3 finger manipulators Brains on-board includes 2 x Intel Atom micro PC and 7 slave microcontrollers, the robot does not rely on an external PC or laptop but still has full Internet connectivity. Our vision with AIMEC:4 is to produce one of the first truly affordable (useful) Personal Robots.

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