- Source: WowWee Alive Chimpanzee
The Alive Chimpanzee is produced by WowWee Alive, a division of WowWee Ltd. The animatronic Chimpanzee is the first in WowWee Alive's product line. Unlike WowWee's other robots, the Chimpanzee only consists of the head of a chimpanzee. It houses eight motors to mimic the facial expressions of a real chimp. It also contains 9 sensors, including IR sensors in the eyes, touch sensors on the chin, top and rear of the head and sound and vibration sensors in the ear. There is also an Alive Elvis manufactured.
In attempting to make the Chimpanzee as realistic as possible, each strand of hair is rooted individually into the skin of the robot and the skin moves and is colored to match realistic skin tones, including veining. As with other WowWee robots, the Chimpanzee can be operated in different modes; in its case, the modes are Alive, Guard, Program, Demo and Sleep.
A Popular Science article on Halloween decorating describes how one can remove the robot's skin to create a Terminator-like robot face.
Features
Some of the Chimpanzee's notable features are:
Mood dependent behavior: responds to stimuli with mood specific animations and sounds
Infrared vision system: detects movement, tracks objects and reacts to human interaction
Touch sensors in his chin, head and ears
Stereo sound sensors detect loud sounds
Remote control or autonomous interactivity
Visual and sonic guard mode
Program mode
Sleep mode
Four Moods:
Curious
Fearful
Happy
Angry
Modes of Operation:
Alive: default mode. Reacts to sensory input, and performs autonomous actions.
Direct Control: responds to user commands.
Program: Up to 20 distinct steps (movements and sounds) can be entered in an ordered sequence that will be stored and can be played back at a later time.
Guard: Uses the vision and sound sensors to detect intruders around it, and reacts in response, either with a random animation or if a program has been entered.
Demo: runs through 2 or 3 random animations.
Sleep: the Chimpanzee will power down after a preset amount of time without activity.
See also
AIBO
Humanoid robot
Roboraptor
Roboreptile
Robosapien v2
WowWee
References
External links
WowWee Alive - WowWee Alive Product site
