WowWee Toys and Evolution Robotics inked an alliance deal last week. WowWee are makers of Robosapien and a growing number of affordable, surprisingly low-tech, and equally surprisingly, high-function (for the price and tech levels) robots. Evolution is best known for their ER1 robot platforms (which use your laptop as their brains) and their vision, pattern-recognition, and robot navigation systems.
Other robot geeks seem excited by the deal. I’m not as sure. I know that each generation of Robosapien and other WowWee bots are getting more sophisticated, and that’s as it should be. They’re building on top of previously proven technologies to create “smarter,” more versatile robots. Solid bottom-up robot development. So I get a little nervous thinking about marrying the lo-tek, largely analog ingenuity of Robosapien with the relatively complex, microcomputer world of the vision and navigation systems that Evolution trades in. I hope that this represents a real meeting of the minds between Mark Tilden (designer of the Robosapien) and his appropriate technology/BEAM approach and the software-minded developers at Evolution and not one where WowWee thinks they need to go all fussy-tech, with lots of digital bells and whistles, to make the next generation of successful robot buddies. Or do they?
I guess what I’m really wondering (out loud) is what Mark Tilden thinks about this deal and where HE thinks the future of Robosapien and its ilk lie? For sure, it’ll be interesting to see what happens next.