About a year ago I wrote about Pleo, the robotic baby dinosaur created by Ugobe. For a long time I felt the price tag was a little too steep but... a few weeks ago I gave in. I had to have one and hopefully hack it in the near future. Since I wrote about it before when I didn't have one I figured it would be nice to write a followup post and review Pleo. So here it is, my non-sponsored (yep, I paid $325 for this baby) review of Ugobe's first and hopefully not last product. Read all about the good as well as the bad!

For quite a while before actually buying a Pleo I had been reading the PleoWorld forums ^*. What struck me as extremely odd, or even flat out weird was the way various forum members talked about their Pleo's. They don't consider it a toy, a robot or an inanimate object. Nope, Pleo is 'alive'. We're talking about grown up adults here, discussing Ugobe's robot dinosaur in the exact same fashion like I would tell anyone about our Jack Russell terrier Jackie, who is very much alive. I didn't quite get it! We're talking about a toy here, albeit a quite pricey one, right???

Ugobe themselves also don't refer to their product as 'toy' or 'robot'. Instead they call it a 'lifeform'. Possibly a bit over ambitious but it does illustrate the sentiment the company is trying to convey. Does the product live up to these high expectations? More about that later.

The Tech

Pleo is an amazing piece of robot technology. I can honestly say that I'm pretty much flabbergasted that it's possible to pack this much technology in a $300-350 package. Let's see what's inside.

Hardware

Pleo has stereo hearing, color camera vision, 14 servo motors, touch sensors, tilt sensors, force feedback sensors, over 100 gears, two 32bit ARM7 CPUs, four 8bit processors for low-level motor control and a whole lot of other circuitry. I wouldn't be surprised if it's smarter than the original 1-week old Camarosaurus it was modeled after. All this is powered by a rechargeable Ni-MH battery which provides 1 to 1.5 hours of operating time between charges. I suppose this may be a somewhat disappointing statistic to some but I think it's fairly impressive given the staggering amount of electric components many of which moving that are powered by this battery. For future hacking purposes however I'm tempted to do the 'umbilical cord hack' ^* that allows the robot to pretty much run continuously without any interruptions.

Software

Pleo is powered by a custom made operating system Ugobe ambitiously calls 'LifeOS'. At the moment it's unfortunately not possible to tap into the features of this OS because Ugobe has yet to release the PDK (Pleo Development Kit) which will hopefully allow 3rd party developers to add new behaviors and enhance Pleo's capabilities. Just like with any piece of computer hardware, hackers usually manage to achieve things the original creators of the hardware deem impossible to do. So far it's been dead silent when it comes to the release of the PDK. Emailing Ugobe about it results in nothing more than a 'we're currently working on this'-reply. I suppose this was fine in 2007 but now that it's 2009 and there's still nothing for us to hack around with would justify a somewhat more elaborate response. What is available at this time are higher level tools such as MySkit and YAPT which make it possible to create 'scripted' behaviours. This means you can make Pleo perform a pre-programmed set of movements and sounds. These are unfortunately completely non-interactive. For interactive behaviors we need... that's right, the PDK.

So, what's this ridiculously expensive toy like?

Like I mentioned before, I was pretty much amazed by the effect Pleo seemed to have on people. Not just kids but grown-ups alike. It made me wonder what effect it would have on my own family. And ... I guess it has the same effect on ours.

Bernie the baby dinosaur

Fairly quickly our Pleo was named 'Bernie'. After a while you pretty much get passed the continuous whirring of the servos and Bernie becomes almost real. I have made a few videos of Bernie in action for you to view but I think they don't fully do justice to what it's like to interact with Bernie. Bernie has many different moods. He can get happy, sad, scared, ill and a lot more. Unlike any other toy robot products I've seen he doesn't become repetitive nearly as soon as any other products. He does NOT have any kind of remote control and is able to operate fully autonomously. Bernie is even able to sense the danger of falling. Put him on a table to walk around and he will NOT fall off. Instead he'll gaze into the depth, moan a bit and then turn around to prevent hurting himself.

Bernie, pulling fingers

Unlike any other robot on the market, Bernie moves extremely naturally. From a bit of a distance you'd swear you're looking at an alive specimen of a long extinct dinosaur race. Leave Bernie to himself and he'll go explore his environment. When he's left alone for too long he'll let you know he needs attention. When you speak to him loud enough, his head will turn to where he heard the talking come from. Petting Bernie results in extremely lifelike reactions. Every time Bernie is on he surprises with different behavior or funny reactions. I guess it's safe to say that Ugobe is the first company that managed to create a product that actually 'feels' like a real animal. As awesome and advanced as Sony's AIBO robot dogs are, they just don't have the same 'alive' vibe like Pleo does. Anything else besides AIBO doesn't even come close. Pleo is one of a kind. There simply isn't anything on the market that can compete with it.

Bernie singing

Abuse and human emotion

Another example of how lifelike Pleo can be is the built-in reactions to abuse. In order to demonstrate this, take a look at this video by DVICE where a Pleo gets (mildly) abused. I did not try any of this myself because first of all I don't want to traumatize 5 year old Addie and secondly, because Pleo's 'remember' how you treat them. It would probably result into Bernie being sad and scared quite a long time. And finally, I figured to not take the chance at being executed first when the robots finally take over the world and see how I treated one of them. Yep, those DVICE people better run and hide when SkyNet takes over ;)

Finally, as a last example of the emotions Pleo manages to invoke in people, take a look at this video where a Pleo gets shredded to pieces (better not show this to your children). For some reason I found this video rather disturbing to watch, even though I know we're just talking about a pile of servos, gears, cpu's and other tech stuff in a rubber skin. Odd, eh? When looking at the comments you'll see that quite a proportion of the reactions disapprove strongly with what's happening. All this demonstrates that Ugobe has hit a home-run with Pleo. I guess it really is as close to a 'life form' as it gets at this moment. If only it would run for a bit longer on a battery charge.

The bad: Meet the world's worst supported toy

Now before you go run to the store and get one of these tech marvels there's some less great things to say about Pleo: the support Ugobe provides. It starts with the warranty. Pleo has only 90 days of warranty which I find absolutely ludicrous for a product this expensive. In Europe this isn't even allowed by law which probably puts a lot of pressure on whoever sells Pleo there. In the Netherlands for example it's required by law to provide at least a year warranty. Wait, it gets worse.

Let's get to the point where I still act a bit paranoid when Addie is alone with Pleo. Here's why. What if Pleo breaks? I'll have to pay to get it repaired, right? Nope. You WON'T get it repaired. There is no such thing as a Pleo repair service. If Pleo breaks, you're screwed. The only thing Ugobe offers is what they call the Pleo 'reincarnation' service which allows customers to buy a new Pleo for $250 and have the 'mind' of their broken Pleo transferred to this new one. Of course this doesn't really cut the cake for many people. It's like getting a new puppy when your dog dies. It nice but it's just not the same thing. And, you'll get to shell out another $250 too. I'm not sure if I will in case Bernie breaks, as much as I like him.

Then there's Pleo's website. Weeks ago, all of a sudden pleoworld.com read nothing more but 'This website has been terminated.'. WTF? I wondered. I was happy this happened just AFTER I downloaded the LifeOS 1.1 update or I wouldn't have been able to get to it for weeks. About a week later some half-broken pages showed up but the most important part was missing: the downloads section. This little 'outage' resulted in Pleo customers to be unable to download software updates and custom behaviors for weeks. This included the 'holidays' behavior which makes Pleo sing xmas songs and be generally extra cheerful. Not many people got to enjoy these downloads for these holidays. After emailing Ugobe asking what the hell was going on I again got the dreaded 'we're working on it' reply. At the moment I'm writing this post, 3 weeks after the site went AWOL one of the most important parts (the user forum) is still unavailable. All this happened without any prior notice and without any 'we're sorry for the inconvenience'-page(s) with the most important downloads still in place. Apparently the Ugobe web team is less competent than the average housewife blogger. There's some room for improvement there guys!

Conclusion

So here's the lowdown on Pleo. Pleo is an awesome product. Full stop. If you have the cash to spare and you like advanced robotics, Pleo is for you, whether you're 8 years old or 38. If you're a geek who wants to hack the hell out of Pleo you better wait for the PDK to be released or be like me and get one anyway and simply pray for Ugobe to get their act together on this matter some time soon.

If you're worried about your investment breaking after 90 days or if you're expecting a lot of support from the company that created Pleo I would recommend against the product. You're pretty much taking a $300-350 gamble because if Pleo breaks, your money is gone unless you're savy enough to perform your own Pleo surgery. And even then you better pray you don't need actual parts. If you have young kids you better make sure they go easy on Pleo too. Luckily this is working out pretty well for me because 5 year old Addie pretty much treats our Pleo like a real animal.

So there we have it. My honest opinion about Pleo. An awesome product with (to say the least) questionable support. Come on Ugobe, shape up and you've got yourself a winner!

* I'd link you but... the forum is still down.......

Tags: ugobe, pleo, robot