Pleo is adorable. Horrifically so. And it’s now only $249 from Amazon. Hell yeah! It beats the hell out of getting a puppy for Christmas.

[Amazon]

I’m talking about robot pets. Autonomous pets have always had a fair share of allure — probably mainly because they never eat/poop/destroyyourhome. Here at Botropolis we’ve shown you robot animals as they’ve trotted into the spotlight, but the sci-fi folks over at io9 have composed a list of 10 notable robotic pets (and billing these ten as “Robotic pets That Deserve to Live in the White House”. But who’s io9 kidding? Malia and Sasha are definitely getting a flesh-and-bone pooch.)
They’ve got the basics like DARPA’s BigDog and Pleo, of course, but there are some on the list you might not have heard of. The Mio Pup is an interactive robot dog that has sensors allowing it respond to your hours of petting. The Mio Pup is only $50, making it the least expensive bot on the list.
A couple therapy-ish petbots made it to the list: the $5,531 robotic baby harp seal Paro, and the $150 Dacky (pictured), which can do some interesting things like sing karaoke and learn 650 words in Japanese.
¥600,000 will buy you the fully-programmable BJ, a la AIBO (RIP). Others on the list can do tricks, play soccer, and take photos. As we progressively ruin the environment, it’s inevitable that one day we’ll have only robotic pets — now imagine the even more horrible effects on the leash industry.
Hopefully this has whetted your appetite for robotic pets; get your fill with the whole list and let us know if there are any robopets you’d like to see added to the list.

[io9]

Pleo is cute and smart, but he’s also handy for learning about robotics. Some boffins at the Otto-Friedrich-University in Bamberg, Germany, known as GRIP (Group for Interdisciplinary Psychology) have posted two tutorials designed to wirelessly connect Pleo to a remote computer so that it can recognize faces.

Just add a small XBee module to the robot, via an internal serial port. This allows you to monitor Pleo’s current internal state and then send it instructions. With a wireless “spy camera”, they replaced the standard low-resolution camera in Pleo’s nose to perform real-time pattern recognition. They are using a remote PC for the processor since Pleo’s can’t handle it. Pretty cool. If anyone tries this, let us know about it.

[Slashgear]