BeatBots » Announcements

Keepon wins Smiley Award :-)

beatbots — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:48:15 +0000

Keepon is the winner of this year’s Smiley Award. The award was established three years ago by Scott Fahlman, creator of the emoticon :-)

To celebrate this award, we propose the following character sequence as a Keepon marker:

(o.o)

Many thanks to the judges!

ICRA 2009

beatbots — Fri, 15 May 2009 07:05:19 +0000

We brought Keepon to the 2nd HRI Robot Challenge (at the ICRA 2009 conference) in Kobe, Japan, May 14-15. He got to play with the extinct robodog AIBO, a worthy adversary…

UPDATE: Keepon has won the competition for the second year in a row! We received a lovely certificate from the Mayor of Kobe.

Pictoplasma/Pictopia Festival

beatbots — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:44:02 +0000

Keepon will be a part of Pictoplasma’s Pictopia Festival in Berlin from March 19-21, 2009. It’s a great honor for us to be in the company of such innovative artists, designers, and animators. And we’ve long been fans of Pictoplasma’s curation and compilation of minimal character designs from diverse communities — now including robotics!

From their web site:

In spring 2009, Pictoplasma and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt will host the PICTOPIA festival, the world’s first ever large-scale presentation and celebration of reduced and abstract character design and art.

In March and April, Berlin will be transformed into a character biotope and a meeting point for an international scene of designers, artists, producers and an interested public. At the heart of the festival is an exhibition which explores the huge diversity of the character universe, where artists remix and sample, condense the surreal and uncanny, inflate all proportions and stage bizarre rituals to introduce their characters into contemporary culture.

The festival programme also features the long-awaited 3rd Pictoplasma Conference which, since its inception in 2004, has set the standard for a playful yet concentrated approach to the subject. For the first time, scientific light will be shed on the character phenomenon in a symposium, which brings together experts from the fields of art history, cultural studies, robotics and media theory.

The Pictoplasma Animation Festival will put the characters in motion, steering well clear of the mainstream. And the Character Walk will lead visitors through 20 galleries and project rooms throughout Berlin-Mitte and deeper into the visual worlds of individual artists.

BeatBots at CES

beatbots — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:36:09 +0000

We’re exhibiting Keepon at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today through Sunday! We’re in the Sands Expo Center, booth #73837D.

UPDATE: Our exhibit was covered by BotJunkie and Discover Magazine. More on the way.

Keepon Pro commercially available for research

beatbots — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:15:08 +0000

BeatBots is happy to announce that we’re making the Keepon robotic platform available for professional institutional users. If you are an institution interested in obtaining Keepon Pro for research and educational purposes, please contact us at info@beatbots.org for more information.

Norri Kageki spoke with us to cover the story for Robot Watch (Japanese) and her GetRobo blog (English/Japanese). Her report was picked up by Gizmodo, Engadget, and BotJunkie.

Meanwhile, we’re working on a less expensive version. Subscribe to our RSS feed to receive updates, or we’ll have a mailing list set up shortly.

Vote for Keepon in Pittsburgh Innovates!

beatbots — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:59:03 +0000

Keepon is an entry in the Pittsburgh Innovates contest, showcasing technologies with a Pittsburgh connection (BeatBots programmer Marek Michalowski is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University).

Show your love for Keepon by voting for him here. (The public can vote once a day until October 26.) Thanks for your support!

Keepon exhibit at NICT

beatbots — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 03:21:01 +0000

Keepon has been enshrined in the Tokyo exhibition room of Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), where Hideki Kozima designed Keepon.

The automated exhibit has an interactive mode (finding and tracking faces) and a dance mode. The exhibition room, which includes other fun NICT technologies, is open to the public. Get directions and hours for the location here (or in Japanese).

HRI Challenge winner

beatbots — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:00:39 +0000

Keepon shared first prize with EPFL’s HOAP-3 in the first ICRA Human-Robot Interaction Challenge. The two robots whiled away the hours of the competition by dancing and crashing conference talks. Watch out for a video soon.

UPDATE: A Japanese article on the Challenge can be found at Robot Watch.

UPDATE: Engadget has a caption contest on this photo.

OK, we made a Facebook page.

beatbots — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 04:04:33 +0000

Now you can display your love for Keepon to your college friends! Become a fan here.

Best demonstration at RO-MAN 2007

beatbots — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:00:25 +0000

We attended the RO-MAN 2007 conference August 26-29 in Jeju Island, Korea with Keepon, who won the Best Interactive Demonstration award.