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.

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.