Sony’s New Toio Wants to Inspire a Future Generation of Robotics Engineers(spoon-tamago.com)
spoon-tamago.com
Sony’s New Toio Wants to Inspire a Future Generation of Robotics Engineers
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2017/06/02/sony-toio-robotics-engineers/
21 comments
When you see Boston Dynamics being passed around like a cheap keg of wine you have to wonder what the upside is for robotics engineers vs. say, search engineers.
If you're a robotics engineer you might get to help maintain the infrastructure that produces most of our food and manufactured goods. I personally have found it to be a very satisfying career choice.
Over the last several years I stumbled into a killer app for robotics: testing. Almost every manufacturer of any thing has a secret testing lab of robots (and engineers to program them). Robotics are good for dealing with dangerous things (like welding or bomb disposal) and those bots get most of the attention. But robots are also great for "boring", tedious things, like tapping buttons for 12 hours straight. Yet those robots don't get as much attention because, well, watching button tapping is slightly boring, and more importantly, many companies want to keep their quality control (and manufacturing) robotic processes a trade secret. Thus, most people have no idea how prevalent robots really are beyond flashy Boston Dynamics videos.
Best part is that your boss doesn't blink when you ask him to approve legos sets and lego boxes bought by the pound to build the boring tapping, sliding, dropping, shaking robot of the week that they need.
Edit: second best part is take your kid to work day when you get to show the 8 year olds your cabinets full of spare lego parts.
Edit: second best part is take your kid to work day when you get to show the 8 year olds your cabinets full of spare lego parts.
yep, seems like robotics engineers should switch to autonomous car engineers for upside, I would assume a lot of knowledge transfers well between the jobs
It looks like Sony does not plan to sell these outside of Japan, at least at launch.
I'd be happy to ship a few from Japan (at a small mark-up), if there's interest.
I'd be happy to ship a few from Japan (at a small mark-up), if there's interest.
Count me in!
I just did some investigation. The first batch seems to be sold out, after a TV segment featured Toio a couple days ago. Pre-orders are now for November delivery.
Still interested?
Still interested?
[deleted]
Yes!
Yes!
Yep!
Yes, I be interested in having it shipped to the UK. Keep me posted with any plans and updates.
It looks like up to four people are interested. Send an email (address in profile), and we'll proceed from there.
[deleted]
I am afraid I won't take much risk. You'd pay me in advance of my placing your order. Alternatively, you could order from Sony's crowdfunder[1] and have them ship it to my address in Tokyo. I would forward the package upon receipt of shipping cost and mark-up.
If anyone has a better suggestion, let me know.
Send me an email and I'll get right back to you.
[1] https://first-flight.sony.com/pj/toio
If anyone has a better suggestion, let me know.
Send me an email and I'll get right back to you.
[1] https://first-flight.sony.com/pj/toio
There are actually lots of companies building robotics toys for kids and inspiring a new generation of Robotics Engineers :-D!
I was that kid in the 80s that played with robotics toys. (My favorite was the Armatron from Radio Shack). When I grew up, I was somewhat disappointed to see that the biggest opportunity in robotics was to make robotics toys to inspire the next generation. These days I make robots that solve real business problems. However, there is an obvious and tempting market for selling them as entertainment/education robots instead. But I'm deliberately trying to make real robots that solve real problems. Sometimes, though, I feel that people are more interested in "useless" robots.
Isn't robotics basically just one cool sounding application of microelectronics and mechanics?
Certainly but that's like saying the cloud is just a cool sounding application of multicore processors. It is, but it leaves out the several very deep software engineering fields of machine learning, networking, and programming as well as the fields of UX/UI design, and quite possibly a whole slew of human behavioral fields.
It is, in the same sense that computing is just a cool sounding application of microelectronics and math.