A learning toy robot Kickstarter, pretty damn neat

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**Ouze**

This is featured in Kickstarter's design section; and I thought it was worth sharing. Note, I have no connection to this product, I just thought it was neat.

Little Robot Friends are cute, smart, and customizable robots - each with a unique personality that develops as you interact with them.

Here at Aesthetec Studio we've been working on big interactive projects for years, and for a while now we've wanted to make something 'Little'.

What are the 'Little Robot Friends'?

The Little Robot Friends are a collection of cute and smart autonomous objects. They can sense the amount of light in a room, they can hear with a small integrated microphone, they can detect your touch and they can also communicate with other Little Robot Friends using infrared light (like your TV remote). They have two RGB LED eyes and a 250mW speaker for expressing their current mood. The brain is an 8-bit 32K microcontroller that provides a lot of space for coding behaviours and storing memories.

In fact, this microcontroller is the same one found in the vast majority of Arduino products - which means that the Little Robot Friends can be easily reprogrammed in the Arduino environment for those who like to tinker.

Each Little Robot is powered by two rechargeable AAA batteries, and depending on the frequency of use should last for weeks or months on a single charge.

Aside from all the hard work put into the circuit design, we've also wanted to create a beautiful object - one that invited you to decorate and personalize it, but could also stand alone with no embellishments.

We love the combination of LEDs and wood - so we've designed a couple different bases that are CNC milled from Oak, Maple, Poplar and Baltic Birch. A good quality wood doesn't require any stain, so we've decided to keep it natural.

We also played around with a variety of different shapes before deciding on the three that we would initially produce - although we would love to make more!!

Little Robots with Big Personalities

We think we've created something beautiful and charming, but what makes it really special is the personality. Every Little Robot Friend has 6 resistor ‘shoelaces’, each representing a different personality trait. Depending on the value of the resistor, it changes the initial personality of the Robot and determines some of its characteristics.

For example, one shoelace controls the continuum between brave and timid, and will affect how it responds to different stimuli - like being afraid of the dark. However, if you comfort your Little Robot Friend by touching it's hair, it will gain confidence and slowly get braver.

Each interaction with your Little Robot Friend is stored as a memory, and changes how it will behave over time. We are working hard to make this a profound experience, one that can surprise you and make you smile as you watch your Friend grow up.

There's the rest at the link above.