TOKYO — The folks who brought you the Walkman are readying what they hope will be the next big fad in personal entertainment: robots. Sony Corp. has proposed its freshly minted Open-R (Open Robot) architecture as an open platform for a market niche that does not yet exist.

"Sony wants to create a very new entertainment robot market," said Toshi T. Doi, president of Sony's D21 Laboratory, which pursues digital technologies for the coming century. "We have developed the Open-R architecture and want to invite many companies to join the entertainment robot arena based on the format."

Entertainment robots, as Sony defines them, are consumer products designed just for play. Sony researchers demonstrated robots scampering after a ball, kicking it and exhibiting other behaviors sophisticated enough to give people the illusion they were playing with a puppy or a kitten. The little tykes walked, sat, stood up, lay down and rolled over on their backs.

The prototype robot is about the size of a very small puppy — roughly three pounds and 5 x 10 x 9 inches. It runs on a 64-bit MIPS RISC processor with 8 Mbytes of DRAM and a newly developed IC. This core system controls attached hardware modules such as head, legs, hands and tail, each with motors and a control chips of its own.

A 180,000-pixel CCD sensor works as the robot's eye, and a microphone and speaker do duty as ear and voice. Application programs — in the demo they were pet behaviors — are implemented by way of PC cards.

Tomorrow's toy
Though Sony has not yet made a marketing plan, Doi said the company is aiming to have some form of robot product out before the end of this century. "We have no idea how big the market will be," he said.

Built around Sony's proprietary Aperios real-time operating system, the Open-R architecture makes it possible to change a robot's body by exchanging hardware modules — substituting a wheel for the back legs, for example. The CPU communicates with each module through the 12-MHz, 12-Mbit/second Open-R bus, and makes an optimum setting based on the parameters stored in the module. Therefore, the modules support hot plug, sort of like an electronic Mr. Potato Head.

"There are various applications available in PC card form, such as wireless LAN. Open-R robots can make use of them as is," said Doi.

Sony developed a chip of about a half million gates that integrates a DSP and graphics-processing engine for signal and IF processing. Sony does not yet have a practical plan of how it will license the architecture or offer the chip, according to Doi.

Sony will stage exhibition soccer games using the prototype robots at RoboCup '98, an academic conference on robot technology to be held in Paris July 4-8. Sony has provided robots to research groups at three universities — Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh; Osaka University in Japan; and to a university in Paris — and the three teams are developing software. In the exhibition games, three robots on a single team will match with another group's robots independently, without any remote control.