Adorable Dragon Robot of the Day: The Personal Robots Group at MIT’s Media Lab has created a small dragon robot designed to interact with children and help them learn. They’ve given their prototype DragonBot the name “Kombusto.”
The furry, clawed DragonBot runs on an Android phone, which displays his animated face, controls his motors and speakers, and receives input from users via a camera and microphone.
The phone also provides an Internet connection, allowing DragonBots to network and learn from each other’s interactions. Even cooler, you can actually remove the phone and bring a virtual DragonBot avatar with you, so you can keep interacting with the character on the go.
Kombusto cost less than $1,000 to build, making him ideal for the Media Lab’s human-robot interaction research.
Imagine how much cooler childhood would have been if we’d been introduced to the DragonBot instead of traumatized by the likes of Furby.
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