Sony’s New Toio Wants to Inspire a Future Generation of Robotics Engineers

yep, seems like robotics engineers should switch to autonomous car engineers for upside, I would assume a lot of knowledge transfers well between the jobs

If you're a robotics engineer you might get to help maintain the infrastructure that produces most of our food and manufactured goods. I personally have found it to be a very satisfying career choice.

Over the last several years I stumbled into a killer app for robotics: testing. Almost every manufacturer of any thing has a secret testing lab of robots (and engineers to program them). Robotics are good for dealing with dangerous things (like welding or bomb disposal) and those bots get most of the attention. But robots are also great for "boring", tedious things, like tapping buttons for 12 hours straight. Yet those robots don't get as much attention because, well, watching button tapping is slightly boring, and more importantly, many companies want to keep their quality control (and manufacturing) robotic processes a trade secret. Thus, most people have no idea how prevalent robots really are beyond flashy Boston Dynamics videos.

Count me in!

I am afraid I won't take much risk. You'd pay me in advance of my placing your order. Alternatively, you could order from Sony's crowdfunder[1] and have them ship it to my address in Tokyo. I would forward the package upon receipt of shipping cost and mark-up.

If anyone has a better suggestion, let me know.

Send me an email and I'll get right back to you.

[1] https://first-flight.sony.com/pj/toio

I was that kid in the 80s that played with robotics toys. (My favorite was the Armatron from Radio Shack). When I grew up, I was somewhat disappointed to see that the biggest opportunity in robotics was to make robotics toys to inspire the next generation. These days I make robots that solve real business problems. However, there is an obvious and tempting market for selling them as entertainment/education robots instead. But I'm deliberately trying to make real robots that solve real problems. Sometimes, though, I feel that people are more interested in "useless" robots.

Certainly but that's like saying the cloud is just a cool sounding application of multicore processors. It is, but it leaves out the several very deep software engineering fields of machine learning, networking, and programming as well as the fields of UX/UI design, and quite possibly a whole slew of human behavioral fields.

It is, in the same sense that computing is just a cool sounding application of microelectronics and math.