Website
Navigation:













Black and Red Q-Taro.



Black, Red, Yellow and a White
Q-Taro. - So cute!



Scan of a red Q-Taro taken from my Japanese "Sony Chronicle" book showing his chargeing station.



Yellow and Silver Q-Taro.



SONY "Q.Taro"
(Quansi-stable Traveling Action RObot)

So what is the SONY "Q-Taro"?

One of the most not talked about SONY products that has been made is the "Q-Taro". Sown for the first time back at the Robodex 2002 exhibition of robots in Japan, SONY demonstrated some of these robot prototypes of what would be a spherical 'healing creature'; the SONY "Q-Taro".

The robot, named 'Q-Taro', witch, like AIBO's name, is an abbreviation for “Quansi-stable Travelling Action Robot”. It's around 6.7 inches in diameter and weighs just over 2 pounds. It consists of a spherical transparent plastic outer shell within which is a coloured ball, where Q-Taro's main body is. When Q-Taro moves, only the other shell will rotate, thus leaving the inner 'body' of Q-Taro always upright. SONY had made many different coloured Q-Taro's, as seen on the pictures on here. Q-Taro's body has several different areas that light up and glow, with varying intensities of colours. Q-Taro also had audio and infrared sensors.

SONY said the robot was developed to foster an emotional connection between humans and robot technology. Q-Taro is not the type of robot that relies on being operated with remote control, like AIBO, it is a full autonomous robot which operates with the computer which is loaded inside Q-Taro. Q-Taro has four temperature sensors that can detect the presence of a person and bring the Q-Taro to life while audio sensors enable it to roll around the floor in time to music. The glowing lights can help it show "emotions", like AIBO does in the same way. With its infrared sensors it can sense the presence of objects and people to avoid running into them. Q-Taro also had speech recognition and could understand and react to up to 10 different spoken words. Q-Taro, like AIBO once again could also self-charge himself which he would automatically return himself to his charging station. The battery life of Q-Taro was around 3 hours long. In addition, you could turn off the human body temperature function thus saving battery and he could last even longer.


Champaign gold and Cyber Blue Q-Taro.

Q-Taro was originally developed by the SONY’s personal audio division, the same people who make the Walkman, and not SONY's Entertainment Robot division. Q-Taro was made to cheer you up and bring a smile to your face, he would just roll on the floor of your home, playing music and being well, really cute. Sadly SONY made no schedule of the merchandising the Q-Taro. When you compare him to AIBO, the technology operational part of Q-Taro is more simple. Q-Taro was another lovely development from SONY. R.I.P Q-Taro.

~ Shanie.





Site © ShanieAIBO - 2004. This site is not affiliated anyway with SONY Corporation.
SONY®, AIBO™, QRIO™, AIBOWare™, Rolly™, 'like.no.other'™ and all other SONY trademarks and their logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SONY Corporation.
PlayStation™, 'PS3™', 'PSP™', and other related trademarks and the PlayStation logo are © Sony Computer Entertainment Inc
.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.