Last week, the MyKeepon.com website went live with a new music video featuring the toy.

We’ve had wonderfully supportive interviews/coverage from Businessweek, Engadget, CNET Crave, MIT Technology Review, Automaton, Robots Dreams, and Adafruit. And our press release has just gone out on the wire.

My Keepon is available for presale in ToysRUs.com in the US (where it has made their Fabulous 15 List), and at other retailers around the world.

In other news, My Keepon saw his first public showings at World Maker Faire. Marek carried My Keepon around the Faire to the great delight of fans and Keepon noobs alike. The toy held up wonderfully to the enthusiasm, handling, and loud noise! We also printed mini-Keepons from yellow ABS plastic (with bonus googly eyes) on our MakerBot Thing-O-Matic and gave them to the most excited children (and a few very excited adults).

We’re as excited as you are that My Keepon will be hitting shelves in just a few weeks!

Become a fan on Facebook and follow My Keepon on Twitter.

Plum TV‘s technology show, Masters of Innovation, has created an episode about the Robotics Institute. We got a lot of great footage of Keepon interacting with kids at the Children’s School. The episode premiered on Plum’s resort cable network on December 23, 2010.

Press included Hack a Day, Butterscotch, Bright Side of News, and two videos by Robotics Trends.  We also had good fun out on the town with Evan at BotJunkie!

Keepon was selected as one of the top 10 robots of the past 10 years by GoRobotics.  At the top of the list:

We tried to pick robots that have made an impact in our culture or have impacted the hobby or science of robots in a major way…  Keepon is hard to describe, other than “incredibly cute,” and it’s still stunning how lifelike and emotive two squishy stacked balls with googly-eyes can be…  Keepon makes the “Top Robots of the past 10 Years” list simply because of his amazing ability to charm his way into mainstream culture.

Read more…

We were covered by Robots Dreams (great to finally meet you, Lem!) and Akihabara News.

Bright yellow, with a cartoonish nose and pair of eyes and standing about 4 inches tall above its base, Keepon looks like a cross between a marshmallow Peep and a snowman. And Keepon has become a YouTube sensation — because this robot can dance.

Keepon can improvise to any song with a reasonable beat, said Brian “Scaz” Scassellati, a computer science professor who received tenure last week, exposing the robot’s inner workings while putting him through his paces. Partially built by former undergraduate Marek Michalowski ’02 GRD ’03 and imported from Japan, Keepon helps Scaz and his assistants — four graduate students and about seven undergraduates — study when and why humans identify with object motion.

Scaz’s team is probing a complicated question: What makes ascribe humans qualities to Keepon?

“It’s a blob that moves around,” Scassellati pointed out. But when Keepon starts to bop its “head” to pop music, many intuitively perceive it to be dancing.

“It really challenges you to define the boundaries of what you’re willing to attribute to something,” he said.

Read more…

UPDATE: Trender Research posted a story about our exhibit.  IEEE Spectrum also has a nice writeup.