For those unfamiliar with Pleo, it is a animatronic baby dinosaur, designed to evolve based on its environment and interactions. Basically he’ll grow as a real baby dinosaur would.  The Life OS software takes Pleo through three separate stages. Being born, hatching, and juvenile. His full range of movements and behaviors won’t show themselves until Pleo continues to “grow”. Not physically mind you.

The original Pleo had a short life-span of only three years, from 2006 to April 2009 when its creation company Ugobe, filed bankruptcy. But two short months later, Jetta, the original manufacturers of Pleo, announced the relaunch of our green, lizard-related friend here under the Innvo Labs brand.

The Pleo World site is back online, fully functional, and awaiting orders. You can get yours for 349.00 USD.

[via Robots Rule!]

Wow. You guys wanted a Pleo. When we offered you one a few days ago I didn’t realize 707 people would comment wildly in hopes of winning a little green dinosaur. Well, there is a winner and he is…

Long time commenter Tom Woolf. Thanks for reading, Tom, and enjoy your sassy little robot.

Jetta Company Limited has decided to re-launch the Pleo and will continue to manufacture the clever little dinosaur including its battery and charger accessories.

Jetta bought the Ugobe IP on May 21 and manufactured most of the robot during the wee one’s short run. Hundreds of Pleo fans will be able to continue to pet their Pleos while rocking back and forth and mumbling about “Seeing something nasty in the toolshed” over and over and not have to risk rubbing away the rubber on its skull and spine.

via RobotsRule

Pleo has always been a favorite over here at CrunchGear, so we put together a little goodbye tribute video in case the adorable robosaurus is indeed extinct.

It actually seems likely that the rights to make Pleo (and the machinery owned over in China) will be snapped up, but if one of the big toymakers does so, they’re under no pressure to continue production. They might wait for the world economy to recover, but they also might just shelve it, knowing they’ve spoiled any competitors’ hopes of capitalizing on Pleo.

Whatever the case, it’s a sad day indeed.

Videos from previous posts and YouTube. Music is Crosby, Stills, & Nash’s “Might as well have a good time” from Daylight Again. A nice smooth yacht-ballad is what Pleo would have wanted.

[image credit: this blog via GIS]

Got a boring weekend ahead? Nothing going on? No friends? Chances are you probably have a Pleo and a Wii then. If so, how about rigging up the Pleo for Wii control? The hack isn’t that simple but when you see the video after the jump, you’re going to want to try it. Plus, it’s not like you need to change dinner plans or anything.

Yeah, this kind of looks like it’s going to go all Skinemax but luckily they just pamper this Pleo at a day spa reminding us that anthropomorphizing little robots is dangerous yet wonderful. Pleo World member maggie44n took her Pleo to the Changes Salon where he got a fossil rock massage.

This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Since getting a Pleo a few months ago, we’ve basically given the bugger a name and gotten to know its personality. To watch this Combot tear Pleo up at Maker Faire is like watching a wolf eat a mouse — it’s no contest
Basically Ugobe donated Pleo for this contest and they put it in with Vicious Verdict, a combat robot used for Battlebot contests. Once VV winds up a little, all hell breaks loose. Very, very sad… and kudos to Ugobe for making a device that humans can love.

Oh Pleo, you’re the best almost-real dinosaur friend a guy and/or gal could ever have.

Just in time for St. Valentine’s Day comes a new behavior download for your Pleo pet. He coos, he flirts, he slices and dices!

From the PleoWorld.com website,

Has Pleo been bitten by the love bug?

He sulks when left alone, but pet him … he wiggles, coos, and sighs happily. Cuddle Pleo and his heart beats with joy as he purrs and nuzzles. Pet him just so; he’ll profess his love and blow kisses. Whistling when he sees something he likes, this baby dino is quite a flirt!

Creepy? You decide. Mothers, lock up your daughters; Pleo’s hungry for love and it’s feeding time.

Pleo Downloads [PleoWorld.com] via Robert from RobotsRule.com

The uber dorks have ported an AIBO tool over to the Pleo so you can make it do wretched things to satisfy your weird taste. Poor Ferbie.

Robots Rule

I never got into the whole Aibo/Pleo/Robosapien thing but TC headquarters just sent me a Pleo to talk about for the Crunchies and I turned it on for my 2-year-old son. He was immediately entranced. To my jaded eyes, Pleo looks like another attempt at creating a “life form” that can convince you to love it and care for it. Furby was like that — it held an odd sway over a number of people I know, even some who were old enough to know better — but I’m convinced Pleo and his ilk are different. Whereas my generation (I was born in 1975 and the guys make fun of me for feeling old but I do feel old, but that could just be sleep deprivation) interacted with electronics using the Sterlingian command line, my son’s generation will take direct intuitive and physical contact with electronics for granted. Stick a web server back end to Pleo and watch it walk around and puke when it crashes and you’d get the general gist. Rub the tummy to reboot MySQL, pat the head to clean out temp files, and then tweak the tail to access another server. This is obviously an over-exaggerated simplification, but things like the iPhone and Surface are changing our relationship to technology on a daily basis.

So what did I see when he began interacting with Pleo? Well, I realized that he was immediately comfortable with the proposition of a life-like dinosaur in the living room. He is, in fact, afraid of it the same way he was afraid of these miniature horses we saw last summer in Greece. He knows it approximates a life form, knows that it can move and affect his life, and he doesn’t quite know its limits. Give him a toy train and he’s in control. Give him a Pleo and he doesn’t know who is in control.

Hopefully this isn’t a precursor of things to come. By building novel interfaces that can run powerful systems — think of a nuclear power plant run from one large screen or a set of large screens manned by attentive humans and some machines — we can oversimplify real life processes. While Pleo looks “real” it is not “real.” Like the Roomba, we can’t trust it not to wander off under the table and fall over. At its core, it’s not a very smart machine. But put some if its interface techniques on a complex system and you essentially have a “way in” to understanding that system.

These ideas are half-baked at best but it was quite eye-opening to watch Kasper “know” this animal in a way he doesn’t “know” his Thomas the Tank Engine toys. This is how he will interact with the world — through touch, through movement, and through the physical in ways that we can’t even imagine. Good or bad, things are changing. I wonder where it will leave us command-line nuts.

iFixIt Pleo

This big nasty men at DVICE posted a video of them abusing and eventually killing their Pleo dinosaur. The video is horrible. They choke the wee guy, then hang him by his tail, and even slap him around. Just you wait. When it comes time for “the Big Change,” these boys will be the first against the wall. Note: We at CrunchGear welcome our robotic lizardoid rulers and encourage them to use our orifices to incubate their cybernetic young.

Pleo is here! But how much punishment can a robot dinosaur take? [DVICE]

Pleo is a new $350 ‘life form’ dinosaur robot created by Ugobe. Unlike all the robot dinosaurs I know (e.g. the WowWee Roboraptor), the Pleo is not remote-controlled. It’s ’self-aware’. It ‘evolves’. It’s also not very badass. This thing, in a very mass-appealing kind of way, is a puppy.

As for the innards: pretty standard. A bunch of touch sensors for caressing, a speaker in the mouth, binaural mics in the ears, some light sensors, and a camera. It’s got a SD card slot and a USB port for, presumably, uploading sweet dance moves. It comes with a plastic leaf that it gnaws on. Pleos can also go multiplayer via IR and when brought together will snuggle and stuff.

Practically, I think this is a perfect fit for the Sony Aibo owner crowd. It’s wayyy cheaper (Aibos were retailing for $2000 before they were axed), it’s got the same sensors, and it’s pretty playful (it freaked the crap out of the TechCrunch dog). One downside is the rubber skin, which is pretty good-looking but not great to pet. Unlike the Aibo, however, the dinosaur comes standard two batts. Most importantly, Ugobe has made this thing just plain animate, and not in an awkward way.

But can you hack it? Pleo runs something called ‘Life OS’ and has a scripting language ‘loosely based on C’. They say “you will be able to modify Pleo’s behavior using scripting, but not the underlying Life OS.” So, basically, no soccer-playing Pleo’s anytime soon. Besides, it wouldn’t be very good. The camera ‘detects light from dark’ and ‘can track a moving object’, but the resolution or shutter speed, unfound, are probably not great. The legs only have two degrees of freedom and so it maxes out hobbling around. But all in all, for $350 bucks, the Pleo is a fine coffee table robot.



Awwww! So cute! Too bad when it grows up it will chew off our faces.

via RobotsRule

Pleo is a little robotic dinosaur by UGOBE that responds to touch, light, and sound. Well, the folks at UGOBE decided to wrap it in fur and see if it still responded to stimuli. Apparently it did and now they have a weird furry dinosaur to play with. What won’t those kids think of!

Interview with on the upcoming Pleo SDK [Robotsrule]

Everyone’s favorite animatronic dinosaur is now one step closer to invading our shores. Pleo’s manufacturer UGOBE is taking pre-orders for the dinosaur and the price isn’t cheap. After earlier reports that Pleo would cost somewhere between $250 and $300, UGOBE has pulled a Nintendo and decided to charge $350 for the lil’ guy. Talk about highway robbery.

Don’t get too excited though. Yes, UGOBE and partners are taking pre-orders, but Pleo isn’t shipping until October. In the mean time, you could always hit eBay for a used Sony AIBO. I had one for a while and although it was a surreal experience, that dog kicked more ass than any furry animal ever did. Hopefully Pleo will compare on some levels.

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