Robots Come to Their Senses via Evolution

WowWee Robotics plans to integrate two technologies from Evolution Robotics, giving its consumer robots visual recognition and positional awareness capabilities.

Evolution Robotics has announced that it has entered into a strategic alliance with WowWee Robotics, whose Robosapian and Roboraptor consumer ‘bots are the best-selling consumer robots on the market today. Through the partnership, WowWee plans to incorporate two unique Evolution Technologies into its consumer robots: ViPR (Visual Pattern Recognition) and Northstar, a positional awareness system.

WowWee licensed Segway’s SmartMotion technology for its consumer robots in October 2005, promising SmartMotion-based products in 2006.

ViPR provides for fast recognition of visual patterns and objects, plus locational information in real world environments. ViPR technology can work in real time across a wide range of angles, distortion, and lighting conditions, and is capable of recognizing multiple objects simultaneously. On a 1.4GHz processor, ViPR can process 15 and more images per second at 208 by 160-pixel resolution, a level more than do-able at a consumer level with today’s technology. Northstar is a low-cost solution which provided positional and locational awareness. Northstar uses triangulation to measure position and heading in relation to invisible IR “light spots” a device projects onto a ceiling or other visible surface. Northstar is not computationally intensive, low-cost, updates ten times a second, and is accurate to a few centimeters in many situations.

“We are excited about joining WowWee to develop a new generation of robotic products that will provide amazing features to consumers,” said Paolo Pirjanian, Evolution’s President and CTO. “These new robots will be truly intelligent and autonomous