On July 15th, Jibo launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo with the goal of raising $100,000 towards developing their new social robot for the home. Less than one week later, Jibo surpassed the $1M mark, with hundreds of pre-orders made for both the home and developers editions.

The brainchild of Cynthia Breazeal, Director of MIT’s Personal Robots Group, Jibo builds on her earlier work in personal robotics (remember Kismet and Leonardo?), and is designed to be an intelligent assistant and companion for the home. The first developers version – sold out at 250 units – is scheduled to release in Q3 of 2015, while the first home version – sold out at 500 units – is scheduled to release in Q4. Preorders are still being taken for 2016 ship dates for both editions.

“We at Jibo, Inc. are absolutely thrilled by the enthusiastic level of consumer and developer support for Jibo. The public is ready to bring social robots into the home! We also see Jibo as being highly relevant for supporting university research in human-robot interaction through our developer program. Our crowd funding campaign is helping us to build a focused community who we can work with to help make Jibo a groundbreaking product when released in 2015. I would be thrilled to see a strong robotics developer community join us in our journey to bring Jibo to the world.” said Breazeal in an email exchange today.

While headlines about Jibo setting new crowdfunding records should probably be taken with a grain of salt (compare Jibo to the top ten business crowdfunding campaigns of all time), no one in the robotics community can deny the excitement of watching Jibo’s early success, in particular with the developer community. According to a report by Crowdfund Insider: it took only four hours for the campaign to be fully funded, 33% of pre-orders have been for developer editions, and after only four days, Jibo achieved a Top 10 ranking among Indiegogo’s Most Funded Tech Projects of All Time. “They were indeed one of the fastest campaigns to reach $1 million on Indiegogo,” said Kate Drane, who leads Indiegogo’s Design, Technology and Hardware section.

“Robotics is really coming of age as a consumer product,” says Andra Keay, startup expert and Director of Silicon Valley Robotics. “People say hardware is hard, but it’s also popular. Nine out of the ten all time top crowdfunded business campaigns have been for hardware and it looks like Jibo is on track to become one of them. It’s fantastic to see a robotics startup getting such great visibility because the secret for ongoing success here is not just attracting users but also attracting developers to build new value for the platform … Jibo is an excellent example of how to successfully tell your startup story and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next.”

Frank Tobe from The Robot Report agrees: “Jibo is part hype and part hope. But the team is wonderful and spans all the relevant areas needed to fulfill all that was promised. Many companies in this space – particularly the ones that started a couple of years ago – are floundering, struggling with technical problems and lack of money caused by delays. The hope is that Cynthia brings newer technology, the best and brightest team, AND that she has the funding covered. Certainly the IndieGoGo campaign shows consumer interest and adds a lot of extra money to the stash. Still, it will be almost a year and a half before we see JIBO so lets not overhype it now so that anything next year will be anticlimactic.”

With so many preorders to fulfill, robotics tech watchers have been left wondering whether Jibo will be able to live up to its promise, especially given the ups and downs of other campaigns that have started off with a big bang but then failed to ship. However, Scott Miller, CEO of Dragon Innovation – another crowdfunding platform that specializes in hardware – says that preorders have their upside too: “Higher volumes do make things easier when it comes to manufacturing as well as follow-on investment.” Miller adds that often the real goal with crowdfunding campaigns, especially with a team as experienced as the one Breazeal has brought together, “is to discover product/market fit”. Breazeal’s focus on building the developer community seems a wise approach to bringing this vision to technical reality.

See. Hear. Learn. Help. Speak. Relate. These are the ways Jibo-the-robot promises to engage with us. All the more reason for Jibo-Inc-the-company to apply the same standards of engagement to their early backers as they move forward, and to hold to their standard that proactive dialogue is key, even when – especially when – there’s a problem. And aren’t there always a few hiccups along the way?

JIBO, a 2013 Boston startup, launched an IndieGoGo campaign last week and is off to a rousing start, lots of favorable press, and, as of the time of this writing, has raised more than $700,000 over their $100,000 goal.

JIBO is a home device with a small screen that conveys emotions but is also used for social services, story-telling and other functions. It isn’t an appliance, nor will it be available until December, 2015. Apps from the JIBO store will be available in early 2016. But it is a momentous step toward a robotic family member that knows your wants and needs.

JIBO sees with two hi-res cameras. It can recognize and track faces, take pictures and enable video calling. It has a see-and-track feature to turn and look at people and to support video calling. It uses AI algorithms to learn your preferences. It can hear, process and speak using natural language and has multiple microphones to let you talk from anywhere in the room. It proactively helps make everyday tasks simpler.

Using natural social and emotive cues, as well as a connection to the home wifi network, it relates to each member of the household, delivering messages and reminders.

JIBO was developed by MIT social roboticist Cynthia Braezeal (now on leave from her teaching gig) and her JIBO team, which includes speech recognition, nonverbal communication and machine learning experts. “It’s really important for technology to be humanized,” said Breazeal in a NY Times story about JIBO. “The next stage in computing, the next wave, is emotion.”

“What if technology treated you like a human being? What if technology helped you feel closer to the ones you love? What if technology helped you like a partner instead of simply being a tool? That’s what Jibo is about,” said CEO and co-founder Braezeal in a JIBO promotional video.

The device is 11” tall and has 3 full-revolute axes, which means that there are three components allowing the screen/head to swivel in any direction. Its oval display is also a touchscreen. It uses a high-end ARM processor and a Linux platform. The combination of swivelling and clever software graphics appears to master the jump from device to social friend. An SDK and developer units will be available months before the consumer December, 2015 ship date. Because JIBO is an open platform, its skills and applications will grow in unimaginable ways and should be fun to watch. Software app developers are paying attention: 1/3 or the IndieGoGo pre-orders thus far are developer units. 

Competitors in the social robot space include the $260 EmoSPARK (a box console with no screen or moving parts that ships later this year), the $575 Russian Cubic console (which is producing a beta run of 100 units later this year), and the mobile ADAM from Milan-based Hands Company (which showed ADAM at CES in Las Vegas earlier this year and plan to begin offering them for sale in Q4, 2015).

I showed the IndieGoGo video of JIBO to two psychologists and my wife (who said that any device that can order Chinese food is a winner and wanted to buy one right away). Both psychologists said that JIBO really seems to have built a device that is socially attuned and likely to be a trustworthy and functional family member. Their comments, combined with the successful IndieGoGo campaign, suggests that JIBO may be a game changer in the new social robot marketplace.

Cynthia Breazeal’s Jibo launched today and coming on the heels of Pepper, Aldebaran and Softbank’s new social robot, and Jimmy from Intel. It seems like we’re seeing a second wave of social robots. Jibo is less of a humanoid than the others though and more of a human mirror, being able to be a telepresence device or a social robot. Jibo will be an open platform and is currently taking preorders via Indiegogo, with an expected shipping date of Sept 2015 for the developer edition.

Jibo raised several million dollars in early seed stage funding from CRV (Charles River Ventures) in January 2013 and have been stealthily hiring and developing ever since. More recently, Cynthia Breazeal took a leave of absence from the Personal Robots Group at MIT Media Lab and Jibo brought on board additional seed investors Osage University Partners and Cambridge-based Fairhaven Capital Partners.

In BetaBoston, John Lee of Osage is quoted as saying that his firm is “excited about the potential of emotional computing, where consumers can have two-way interaction with their devices through natural forms of communication: speaking, eye contact, body language, and intonation. The nature of this interaction opens up significant opportunities in various fields that require deeper insights into a consumer’s emotional state. Given the team’s exceptional backgrounds, they are the right people to deliver on such a vision.”

Breazeal’s vision is to create robots that can provide parents with a high quality partner in education, provide a life coach for people with chronic health issues, and provide a watchful companion for the elderly that behaves like a friend and not a surveillance system or monitor.

Jibo features two hi-res cameras to recognize and track faces, capture photos and enable immersive video calling. 360° microphones and natural language processing let you talk to JIBO from anywhere in the room. Hands-free reminders and messages, so you’ll never forget and can always be in touch. Artificial Intelligence algorithms learn your preferences to adapt and fit into your life. Like a personal assistant, JIBO proactively helps you, to make everyday tasks simpler and easier. Communicates and expresses using natural social and emotive cues so you understand each other better. [Jibo website]

The first wave of social robots occurred between 1998 and 2009, and their primary characteristic is their ‘pet’ nature. The Tamagotchi (1996 onwards) could be considered a primitive precursor. Social ‘pet’ robots included; Furby 1998 -2007 (reintroduced 2012), AIBO 1999-2006, Keepon 2003-now, Paro 2004-now, iDog, 2005-2009 and Pleo 2006-2009. Some of these were intended for therapeutic settings, like the original Keepon and Paro, but all were intended to create an emotional relationship with people, and not simply to perform functions.

It’s important to specify that social robots have existed in labs and research for some time, so I’m really talking about products that cross the chasm and become consumer products. Robosapien (2004-now) by Mark Tilden at WowWee is one of the few humanoids to come out during this time, but due to the small size and limited interactions, Robosapien seems closer to a pet or smart toy, than to a social robot.

The second wave of social robots is building both on general advances in robotics and specifically on improvements in NLP, natural language processing, leveraging the massive deployment and rapid improvements of voice recognition/response agents like those used by Google, Apple and Amazon.

Computing has gone through several waves, each resulting in billion dollar industries and impacting millions if not billions of people’s lives on global scale. We’ve benefitted from the wave of information, the wave of mobility, the wave of social media. We’re seeing more and more wearable computing and the Internet of Things that combines these three.

Now, we are on the threshold of the next wave of computing: emotion.  And social robotics is a particularly powerful expression of this next wave. [Cynthia Breazeal – Why social robots will change your life]

http://on.ted.com/Breazeal

Robohub is an online platform that brings together leading communicators in robotics research, start-ups, business, and education from around the world. Learn more about us here. If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Building Social Robots: The Journey of Pleo
• The next era of conversational technology
• On Pepper, Aldebaran and emotional robotics: Interview with Bruno Maisonnier
• Why social robots will change your life
• Robots Podcast: A Code of Ethics for HRI Practitioners
• Robot helps 94-year-old Italian grandmother live independently at home
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

It is a fantastic time for technology. We live in a more connected world, and compared to even a few decades ago, we have vastly improved access to information and content, and have dramatically expanded our ability to connect with one another in interesting new ways to socialize despite time and distance.

As much as I love what technology does for us, and it certainly does quite a bit, our relationship with technology can still be dramatically improved.

Technology can feel dehumanizing. Technology often demands that we think and act more like machines to use it. It treats us like technology, beeping, buzzing, and pushing data and information at us without concern for politeness. It interrupts our conversations, not caring if we understand the information, or determining if the information is wanted. I let my son play on my smartphone once, and now I’m rewarded with daily updates about zombie harvesting – enough! We need to do better.

We need to humanize technology so that it treats us the way we want to be treated.

But there is an even deeper reason to improve this interaction. My fundamental gripe with technology is that it fails to support a more holistic human experience. It falls short in giving people a personally meaningful, emotionally engaging experience.

This shortfall actually limits the ability of technology to support and empower us to succeed, thrive, and grow.

Really?

Yes. Here’s why.

People think, feel, and act not just because of information, but also because of personally meaningful experience. Things have to matter to us, not just inform us, to effect real change.  There is a rich scientific literature on the role of emotion in intelligent decision-making and behavior change.

People who make careers of helping other people — educating others, helping to heal or care for others, or helping people to take better care of themselves — all know the power of high touch on positive human outcomes. Learning new knowledge and skills opens opportunities for growth. Adopting behaviors that keep you healthier increases your chances of thriving as you age. Forging and maintaining stronger relationships with those you love promotes mental and emotional wellbeing. Your life is better when you can do these things.

We should care about these things at face value. And there is urgency to do so.

We are facing juggernaut societal challenges where we cannot rely solely on our institutions to take care of us, to educate us, to keep us healthy. It is too expensive and the growing demand continues to outpace available institution and human resources. We see the headlines: the education crisis, the healthcare crisis, the eldercare crisis, and more.

Millions of people are grappling with these issues every day, and we can help relieve the crushing burden on our institutions by empowering people in their homes.

My vision is that:

… Even in the most time-crunched families, parents will have a reliable, high-quality partner in education for all children. Including our youngest learners who shall enter school ready to learn, or children with special needs, receptive to the quality education they need.

… Those people who struggle with health or chronic disease issues will have the right kind of tools to change behavior, and can independently manage their health and improve their treatment.

… Elders will be able to age independently in their homes with the help of a technology that feels much more like an attentive companion than yet another digital tool or a “Big Brother” monitoring system, relieving pressure on oversubscribed institutions, and remain emotionally connected to their families and loved ones despite distance.

And so much more.

To realize this vision, we all know that technology must be part of the solution. It’s affordable. It’s scalable. It’s accessible at home. This is a good start. But it needs to be more.

Personal technology needs to go beyond giving us access to information anywhere we are. It needs to go beyond opening a communication channel between people. It needs to go beyond being easy to use. It needs to go beyond being cool and desirable. All of these attributes are still critical pieces. But they do not yet form the full answer.

Technology needs to support what people need to be the most empowered to effect positive change in their life and for their loved ones. High tech must support high touch engagement for the best and most lasting results. Only then will technology maximally empower our human ability to fully engage with it — how we experience, think and behave at the intersection of our cognitive, social, emotional and physical capabilities — to succeed, thrive, and grow with technology like never before.

Technology needs to be humanized.

Computing has gone through several waves, each resulting in billion dollar industries and impacting millions if not billions of people’s lives on global scale. We’ve benefitted from the wave of information, the wave of mobility, the wave of social media. We’re seeing more and more wearable computing and the Internet of Things that combines these three.

Now, we are on the threshold of the next wave of computing: emotion.  And social robotics is a particularly powerful expression of this next wave.

This is what social robotics is about. This is why it is so transformative. This is why it is revolutionary.

This is why it will change your life.

This post was originally published on blog.myjibo.com, where Cynthia Breazeal will be curating articles about social robots.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in watching Cynthia’s ROBOTS: From imagination to market talk, or in reading the following articles:

• Robots14 brings it all together
• Robots Podcast: A Code of Ethics for HRI Practitioners
• What should a robot do? Designing robots that know right from wrong
• Consumer AI devices entering the marketplace

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Link to audio file (24:44)

In today’s episode we meet with Natalie Freed, David Robert and Adam Setapen from Cynthia Breazeal’s Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. They’ll be telling us about the Playtime Computing System, a playground where kids can interact with the physical world and its virtual extension.

The playground looks like a dream-like play-area with objects kids can interact with, including a robot that looks like an alphabet block and can be decorated with letters, shapes and even a mustache. The physical playground is surrounded by an engaging virtual world projected on a set of screens. Robot characters can seamlessly transition from the real world to the virtual world by entering a portal (which is basically a robot garage). Since anything is possible in the virtual world, robots can gain new capabilities, such as flying, and kids can rearrange the world or add their own virtual objects to the mix using a Creation Station. The children’s behavior is tracked using 3D motion capture as well as other sensors such as cameras and audio inputs.

The playground brings a whole new dimension to the idea of play, getting kids off the couch, engaging in creative activity that could bring them to a virtual cafe in France to learn french or allow them to build a whole new world to share with other kids around the world. In the interview, David, Adam and Natalie tell us what they learned from experiments with the Playtime Computing System, the fun anecdotes that come-up when working with kids, and the future of interactive media.

So when do we get one of these at home?

Natalie Freed

Natalie Freed finished her Masters in Computer Science at Arizona State University with a concentration in Arts, Media, and Engineering. She joined the MIT Media lab last summer as a graduate student and has since been interested in studying human-robot interactions with kids.

David Robert

David Robert has a decade of expertise in the film industry working as a Technical Director and Animator. Over the years he’s consulted and worked with the world’s top animation studios including PIXAR, Dreamworks, LucasArts, ILM and Disney Imagineering. He also taught at The Academy of Art, Walt Disney Feature Animation, Pixar University and gave lectures around the world. He’s currently doing a PhD at the Personal Robots group as a first step in showing that the “future of animation is off the screen”.

Adam Setapen

Adam Setapen has a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and a strong background in AI. He joined the Personal Robots Group as a graduate student with the hope of developing robots for children that support long term interaction.

Links:

• Download mp3 (14 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Personal Robots Group homepage

Link to audio file (29:25)

Today’s episode was recorded at the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab in the middle of some beautifully expressive robots such as the Huggable, Tofu and Leonardo. There, we had a chance to speak with Sonia Chernova about the Mars Escape online game that is being used to learn about how humans and robots can work in teams. We then speak with Kenton Williams about the technical aspects behind one of their most expressive robots, Nexi.

Sonia Chernova

Sonia Chernova received her PhD from CMU, where she worked with Manuela Veloso (see Robots interview).

She is now working as a post-doc at the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab , directed by Cynthia Breazeal (see Talking Robots interview). At MIT, she’s looking at how to create robots that are able to assist and work with humans in a natural, predictable and robust way by gathering data through a new online game dubbed Mars Escape in a world premiere at using the Internet to study human-robot interactions. Anyone can participate in this experiment by taking on the role of a robot or an astronaut in an attempt to escape from their oxygen-deprived Mars-base without leaving anything important behind. Give it a try!

Using the data from thousands of players, Chernova will look at how to use the dialogs and actions performed online to generate a computational behavior model for each player. This model will then be tested online and then implemented in the Nexi Robot in a physical replica of the Mars Escape game that will be set-up in the Boston Museum of Science.

Finally, Chernova will be joining Worcester Polytechnic Institute as an Assistant Professor of Robotics Engineering in the fall of 2010.

Kenton Williams

Kenton Williams is expert in the bolts and nuts of Nexi. As a Mechanical Engineer, he will be telling us about the technical aspects and challenges behind the robot and his thesis on making Nexi learn physics!

Links:

• Download mp3 (18.2 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Sonia Chernova’s Website
• Kenton Williams’s Homepage
• Personal Robots Group

Latest News:
For more information on this episode’s news, including videos of Anybots’ and Willow Garage’s telepresence robots and more information on Microsoft’s surprising move, visit the Robots Forum.