Roboni-i
© 2009 Robonica
Roboni-i is a programmable $250 wheeled robot designed to be as much at home in a virtual world as on your living room floor. The concept is being called "robotic gaming" and it is coming from a South African-based toy company called Robonica (www.robonica.com), who has enlisted the help of Tom Dusenberry, former head of Hasbro Interactive, to help them with their attempt to invade the US market. You can hear Mr. Dusenberry explain the Roboni-i concept at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FD379NTG80. After you install the batteries in the robot (6 AAs), the remote (4 AAs) and the home base (2 AAs), you can start driving the speedy shoe-sized robotic vehicle around the room. The large wheels move easily over thick carpets, and front/back crash sensors minimize the damage from chair legs, or other robots. A second player can interact to play games using a form of bluetooth (Zigbee peer-to-peer RF protocol) in order to play six games, including soccer with a ping-pong-sized ball, or a frozen tag, where you try to stun the other robot before it stuns yours; a simple game our testers liked. The kit includes a set of RFID embedded plastic disks that can be scattered around the floor, serving as an obstacle course. Things get interesting when the robot is plugged into your Windows computer (no Mac version) by way of a USB port. Using the included suite of drag-and-drop programming tools, you can customize the robots behaviors similar in ways to LEGO Mindstorms. You can also drive your robot around a virtual world, completing missions or interacting with others who might be online at the same time. And in the virtual world, you don't need any batteries.
$250, Windows
Teaches: programming, robotic play, remote control operation (fine motor and spatial thinking), strategy