In the picture above, last flatcat of the 2021 Kickstarter campaign batch, packaged and ready to be shipped. By now we have word that it has arrived.
Very happy to be finishing our third crowd-funding campaign. This one was clearly the most challenging so far.
In the video you see a real and spontaneous interaction with the pet-robot flatcat by an initially quite reserved user, in the course likening the the robot to a real live cat known by the user called Rasputin. flatcat-in-the-wild.
Jetpack Cognition Lab is a science driven robotics startup from Berlin. The lab was founded in 2019 by Oswald Berthold and Matthias Kubisch, two roboticists that came to know each other at Humboldt University of Berlin. The mission is to engage in science communication, and the chosen means to achieve this is through consumer robots. The idea here is to enable a direct experience of cutting edge research, as it drives the motion of what you hold in your hands. On the concrete scale this involves product development, and storytelling for a new kind of robotics.
A wave of social robots is coming at society and it is being developed right now. Jetpack wants to be part of this development and push towards favorable outcomes. Social robots, by definition, need to step up robot skills in interacting with humans on eye level. The major skill required here is the ability to quickly adapt to unforeseen situations. The science inside is that of developmental learning, which powers the next breakthrough in robotics and intelligent machines. Because true intelligence is always about adaptivity, a fancy word for the ability to learn.
In 2021 the team has launched flatcat – a pet-like robot that responds to touch. It has the feel of a furry animal while it does not resemble any existing animal. This is a conscious choice in the design of the robot, because resemblance raises expectations, and compared with any real animal, current robots can only fail. flatcat is like a flat caterpillar consisting of three joints. These joints are smart in that they are not only able to move, but also to register their own motion, and any resistance they meet while they are moving. With such sensor and motor capabilities combined in a single device, it is called a sensorimotor. These sensorimotors connected in a row via the flatcat chassis is all it needs to create the entire behavioral spectrum of the robot.
Watch Jetpack at work on their website or any of their social media channels.
Pictures
This is a simple version of our pet robot comparison matrix
Legend: Yes (Y), No (N), Crowdfunding (C), Pre-order (P), S (Secondary market), M (Maybe)
| name | open | touch+ | price | cloud | avail | cute | company |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| pets | |||||||
| Tamagotchi | N | N | < 100 | N | S | 20 | Bandai |
| Furby | N | N | 180 | Y | Y | 100 | Hasbro |
| Moxie | N | N | 1700 | Y | Y | 70 | Embodied, Inc. |
| Paro | N | M | 5000 | N | Y | 100 | AIST |
| Nicobo | N | N | 300 | Y | C | 100 | Panasonic |
| Qoobo | N | N | 400 | Y | Y | 100 | Yukai Engineering |
| Moflin | N | N | 400 | Y | C | 100 | Vanguard Industries |
| Marscat | Y | N | 700 | N | C | 30 | Elephant Robotics |
| flatcat | Y | Y | 500 | N | C | 70 | Jetpack Cognition Lab |
| Bittle | Y | N | 250 | N | C | 30 | Petoi |
| Aibo | N | N | 2800 | Y | N | 70 | Sony |
| Cozmo | N | N | 220 | Y | P | 70 | Digital Dream Labs |
Jetpack Cognition Lab is a science driven robotics startup from Berlin. The lab was founded in 2019 by Oswald Berthold and Matthias Kubisch, two roboticists that came to know each other at Humboldt University of Berlin. The mission and purpose is, on a grand scale, to engage in science communication, and the chosen means to achieve this is through consumer robots. The idea here is to enable a direct experience of cutting edge research, as it drives the motion of what you hold in your hands. On the concrete scale this involves product development, and storytelling for a new kind robotics.
A wave of social robots is coming to society at large. It is being developed right now, and Jetpack wants to be part of this development, in order to push towards favorable outcomes. Social robots, by definition, need to step up robot skills in engaging, and interacting with humans on eye level. The major robotic skill required here is the ability to quickly adapt to unforeseen circumstances, as they occur all the time in the daily affairs of us humans. The science inside is that of developmental learning, which mediates the next breakthrough in robotics and intelligent machines. Because true intelligence is always about adaptivity, a fancy word for the ability to learn.
The challenge is approached by changing the definition and cultural perception of robots. By doing this, a strong lever is attained on creating impact, not only with direct action, but also indirectly by contributing to making a hard tech field like robotics more approachable and accessible to a much wider audience. The rationale behind this is: “Whether it is us or the person over there that will make a decisive contribution on the road to such radical change in society, we want to be part of it by accelerating the rate of dissemination of knowledge that we think is relevant, and thereby foster the ecosystem”.
Since the team began work on Jetpack, it has launched two robots already, flatcat and Bakiwi. flatcat is a pet-like robot that responds to touch. It has the feel of a furry animal while it does not resemble any existing animal. This is a conscious choice in the design of the robot, because resemblance raises expectations, and compared with any real animal, current robots can only fail. flatcat is like a flat caterpillar consisting of three joints. These joints are smart in that they are not only able to move, but also to register their own motion, and any resistance they meet while they are moving. With such sensor and motor capabilities combined in a single device, it is called a sensorimotor. These sensorimotors connected in a row via the flatcat chassis is all it needs to create the entire behavioral spectrum of the robot. It will always, and very sensitively so, react and respond to any force it feels across its joints, whether they are generated by gravity’s pull or by a person’s push. If you leave flatcat alone for a while, it will become bored and start to play around with itself, until you pick it up again.
Bakiwi is the fabulous DIY walking robot kit. It is a small walking robot, allowing curious minds to study the phenomenon of walking up close and hands on. It comes as a solder kit suitable for children starting from age six up to children-like adults in their eighties. The robot needs to be assembled using the PCB and electronic components which come as part of the kit, frame, legs, and batteries included. Once the electronics and the frame are assembled, Bakiwi is ready to walk, requiring zero programming, apps, or other screen based device access.
Watch Jetpack at work on their website or any of their social media channels.
On Mar 9, 2022 the first prototype of the flatcat robot became a two years old. The robot is still healthy and functional. It is used on a daily basis by @x75 to control his weird synthesizers (“huh, but the sound is gloomyβ¦ π₯Ά”). What is happening there? It is happening that the motion of the robot is controlling the sound. Wah!
You can enjoy all of this in one single piece in the video below. If you cannot get enough, there is two more of them. Find them on Youtube and post the links in the comments. Thanks for hanging in β₯οΈ
Our first paper with a jetpack affiliation, titled
flatcat -- playful robots that respond to touch
has been published and is available on @ResearchGate
If you have ever wondered about the technical background of this unique robot, go read the full text on https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359083587_flatcat_–_playful_robots_that_respond_to_touch and don’t forget to leave us a recommendation if you like the paper.
This was an original contribution to the Workshop on Robot Curiosity in Human Robot Interaction (RCHRI), https://sites.google.com/view/rchri/home, organized as part of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, https://humanrobotinteraction.org/2022/workshops/.
See first 12 seconds of this Instagram video by way of Florentina Leitner – the green π© is awesome and clearly, a live #flatcat is missing π
What does it have to do with flatcat? It means, if you had a flatcat in your fake fur hat, you would not need to animate it. You could just shoot it.
thanks heidi for sharing @qbernetik @LabJetpack
Brains and nervous systems are the most exciting and truly weird topics to discover.
They can be approached through neuroscience, ethology, psychology, cognitive science, arts, brain-inspired computing, and bio-inspired robotics.
Or, even in some other ways. Easy, because our own brain and CNS is involved in all our perception and acquisition of knowledge. It is involved in everything we are and do. It is us, and it is bodily (somatic) all the way down. This is called embodiment.
If the 20th century has seen the emergence of non-classical theory in physics, it has also seen the beginnings of non-classical theory in, ultimately, biology. Biology as the basis and substrate of the majority of intelligent behavior we are observing, anywhere.
Anyway, bla bla. Just finished reading βA thousand brainsβ by Jeff Hawkins, who you might know from Numenta, their papers, or from the earlier book βA new kind of intelligenceβ, which I havenβt read.
The work presented and discussed in the book is about the human neocortex, its computational mechanics, and its principles of organization.
What the brain does, in general, is to create models of the world, which it then uses to make predictions and find ways (sequences of actions) to get to goals (usually related to survival, in the broad sense of the complicated lifeβs of contemporary humans). This is called inverting a model.
In the book, the idea that these internal models donβt come in singular, but rather in a massively large bundle, a huge flock of models, is expounded and illustrated in clear and fun prose, including some pictures.
One of the weirdest things about the brain is the modelling decomposition. Sorry. I just love that word so much.
What is decomposition? I donβt mean the degenerative one. It is meant in the mathematical sense of decomposing something complex into a set of simpler things, together with an explanation of their interactions, so that the overall story will yield the original phenomenon.
Most of us will have an acquired and consciously accessible decomposition of the world in our heads, called a mindset. Usually thatβs objects, persons, domains; interactions come via force and gravity, light, sound and touch, inner focus and sociality, etc;
So the cool thing that the brain does, is a) to decompose the world into a soup of models, and b), that this decomposition is mostly and unconsciously completely different and utterly alien to our own introspective thinking. It just doesnβt align. No, it doesnβt. The objects of conscious introspective thought are just the tip of the iceberg, of all unconscious mental and neural activity, not available to introspection.
One of the reasons that this is so is somatics, properties of a physical body that needs to compute in a physical universe, governed by energy equations, metabolics, and distribution networks. Limitation as a resource. Work that.
The story of the relationship between the subjective introspection experience of feeling and living, and objective neural mechanics is one of the most pressing issues in science communication.
Why? Because understanding our own behavior and decision mechanics is essential for our civilization to survive the 21st century. Period.
Hawkinsβ book throws a lot of stepping stones out into our path through a foggy toxic lava swamp. Highly appreciated and recommended.
Go check on book home
Posted originally on dynatropes – mission log from climbing mount improbable. where you at?
the Special (Robot) Pet!
What I love about Flatcat is that she reacts always differently to touch and her Environment! The funny little Sounds she made and her extremly soft feeling. In my Opinion she comes pretty close to a Bio Pet but is one of a kind, and not everyone owns a Flatcat so to me she is very Special π Some don’t like how Flatcat looks like or that she is Creepy! I think it is a lot more important what is on the inside, just like with humans, where it is more Important how you are than how you look like. π Please watch that Video
Thank you so much π