Fujisoft's PARLO Robot Revealed

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Japanese tech company Fujisoft has showed off a new small humanoid shaped robot friend for you. It’s got a rather awesome name, too. They’ve dubbed it “PALRO”, a combination of ‘Pal’ and ‘Robot’. It’s roughly 15-inches tall and features open software for customization.

The PALRO will stand about 15-inches tall and weighs in at 3.5 pounds. He’ll have 20 different degrees of freedom, a 3-megapixel camera, 4 directional microphones, a speaker, LED arrays in his head and chest, 4 pressure sensors in each foot, a 3-axis gyro sensor and an accelerometer. Everything a little robot needs.

As for his internal computer workings, it’s very similar to a netbook oddly enough. He’s running a nondescript Intel Atom processor that’s clocked at 1.6GHz. 1GB of RAM and 4GB of flash memory are included. He also has WiFi connectivity. However, like everything with an Atom processor, HD Flash lags when he views it. (A joke). He’s also supposedly running a modified version of Ubuntu along with Fujisoft’s own custom software.

During the press conference, PARLO responded to verbal commands like “Step back” and “Introduce yourself”. The robot was also able to identify three people at once via face recognition software. Also in a nice touch, when PARLO is using his camera, the LED display in his head changes to a camera icon. Any pictures he takes can be automatically uploaded to a PC via his WiFi connectivity.

PARLO also has news reading features. During the press conference he was asked to read the newspaper. Apparently, he asked “What section?” and then read that day’s headlines from the newspaper accordingly. In another charming touch, PARLO held out his arms as if he was holding an invisible newspaper while he did this.

PARLO will go on general sale to all in Japan sometime this year. However, it’ll have a steep price of ¥298,000 ($3,336).