POLYRO Open Source Robot Is Cute And Friendly

I really like robots and I can't wait until we can have our own affordable bots to help around the house. There is so much research going into robots for various uses today that new designs are surfacing all the time. A new bot has come to light called POLYRO. POLYRO stands for oPen sOurce friendLY RObot. You can see for the caps in the long name where the short version came from. The little bot is cool and looks a bit like some sort of toy with a smiling face and frog eyes.

The bot stands about 3'3" tall making it roughly the size of a five-year-old child, and it weighs 19.5 pounds. That weight is without the netbook that acts as POLYRO's brain. The bot has two arms that each have three degrees of freedom. It's head can nod and the eyes can blink. The eyes are stereoscopic as well, the bot has 11 Robotis Dynamixel servos in the current design, and those eyes are webcams.

The netbook used for the brain of the bot runs Linux and all the parts, netbook included, to make the robot were under $2,000. The designer of the robot is Tim Payne, and he hopes that other people will help with the project and extend the capability of the bot with things like facial recognition. The designer is also hoping the arms will get more degrees of freedom and perhaps speech synthesis will be added.

[via Plastic Pals]