Your Next Cute Robot May Be Korean

Pibo and Cubroid are friends. In a state where iii behemothic conglomerates (LG, Samsung, and Hyundai) suck upward most of the technology talent, these two pint-sized little robots could exist the future of Korean hardware innovation.

Pibo is a 3D-printed, Raspberry Pi-based "family companion" that tin can utilize the internet to respond questions well-nigh your world. Cubroid is a bunch of robotic blocks that help kids learn how to program using physical objects. The 2 are part of a pocket-size club of companies in Korea's new startup scene, which is dominated past software and services.

In a presentation, consultant Nathan Millard of G3 Partners says there'southward been a massive upswing in the number of Korean startups in the past five years, with more than than twenty accelerators, a vibrant investment scene, and major authorities back up. When I visited the startups behind Pibo and Cubroid, I found a new Digital Media City (DMC) past the onetime World Loving cup stadium featuring towers stuffed with dozens of minor startup companies.

Pibo (at right)
(Pibo, at right, is the third generation of Circulus's robots.)

The biggest challenge, it seems, is global breakout. Of the 46 startups that DMC's Yu Bae Park told me he helps manage, only nigh ten percent are currently looking at markets outside Korea. Millard points out that "of Korea's recent standout successes ... none have constitute success beyond Korea."

Korean tech firms other than the big iii have tended to develop primarily for their ain market place—Korea has its own analogues of Google (Naver), Facebook/WhatsApp (Kakao), and diverse other services—and they don't tend to think or speak globally. That's changing, too, though. The Pibo and Cubroid guys, while unpolished and thoroughly engineer-driven, have their optics attack the global market, and even on the United states.

One affair near being in a small scene is that everyone knows each other. Cubroid's Mark Shin showed me a Javascript book written past Pibo'southward Jonggun Park, and said he wanted to utilize Pibo's large-data AI system in the future. That'south the kind of cantankerous-pollination a startup scene could use to succeed.

Large Data, Small Robot

Pibo is clearly one of DMC's darlings. It'south fabricated by Circulus, which is led by Jonggun Park, a former Samsung engineer who was working on IoT and big information projects when he became convinced that the fashion to button Korea forward was to teach everyone to code.

"I think that if everyone could brand their own programs in Korea, and then our country will be stronger," he said.

Coding somewhen became robots because, well, "almost guys love robots." Coding robots thus became Pibo: an open-source, Raspberry Pi-based, 3D-printed home robot with its own cloud-based organisation, where you can lawmaking it through a block linguistic communication, utilise JavaScript or download features that other people have written.

"Nosotros will provide our own functions for families, just anybody tin can add their own ideas for programming, share their ideas, and download other peoples' ideas too," Park said.

Pibo'south demo reel shows the petty bot being a home and family companion. Pibo plays soothing music, asks about your emotions, and takes notes to relay to other family members. It has personality. The coolest thing about Pibo isn't the hardware. It's the AI platform. Remember, Park started out as an AI engineer.

Pibo'southward platform scrapes Google and the Korean services Naver and Kakao, and mixes in news sources like the New York Times and BBC News, trying to fit queries to web data the mode Google Banana does. The company likewise plans to integrate the Alexa API and allow Pibo utilise Alexa skills. So when I asked Pibo what she thinks of Donald Trump, she gave a consensus based on the contents of Korean blogs. (They don't much like her.)

Google Habitation and Alexa are trying to do this every bit well, of grade, but the extra twist for Pibo is that she'south mobile. She's non very mobile—she's slow, and only has almost 2 hours of bombardment life when she's on the movement. Simply she can amble around a table using her photographic camera to do video calls with various people sitting there, for instance.

Pibo's heart is a Raspberry Pi 2. Park said they'd similar to use a Pi 3 or Pi 4, just the two is the right cost to keep the robot under $500. "I desire an intelligent robot for everyone, so we focused our price," he said.

The idea here is to let everyone do the level of DIYing they want. Are you hardcore? Circulus has uploaded the whole thing to Thingiverse, a repository of 3D press codes. Just want a cuddly dwelling companion? It'll cost under $500 when information technology goes on Kickstarter in September.

Totally Cubular

You lot know those guys who can sort of do everything? Marker Jaekwang Shin (below, right) is ane of those guys. He's a lawyer. He programs. He has an MBA. Just right now he'due south living off some money his brother-in-law lent him and funding from various Korean seed funds and prizes, in a cluttered picayune office at the top of a slightly run-down building halfway to the Seoul airport, miles from the DMC startup hub.

Cubroid

Shin has three daughters, ages 11, 8, and 5, and he wants them all to lawmaking. So he came up with a set of configurable Lego-similar blocks that can exist programmed either with a smartphone app (because it'southward impossible to become the kids off their phones, he says), or with the popular educational language MIT Scratch.

"The time to come of education is very interesting to me," he said. "I wanted to get [my xi-twelvemonth-erstwhile] to lawmaking, using something like a robot." (Me too.)

The Scratch connection is what drew me to Cubroid, because my daughter is into Scratch. It'south non just a language, information technology's also an unusually positive, reinforcing and condom online community for kids: Lodge Penguin for li'50 coders.

Cubroid's function is a mess of boxes of little Lego-like cubes, naked circuit boards, and i gear up of shelves with every other educational robot they could think of, for inspiration.

The Cubroid blocks, two years in the making, snap together just like Lego. A prototype beginning generation used magnets, but a snap-together toy is safer, Shin said.

Cubroid blocks

There are 10 different cubes: a knob; proximity, light and bear upon sensors; two motors; an LED light grid; a buzzer, a "principal" cube and dummy spacer cubes. Each functional cake has its own little battery, which charges via MicroUSB. They're color-coded by role: green and red for functions, blue for the master cube, and orange for spacers. The master cube communicates with a smartphone via Bluetooth or a PC via USB, and so communicates with sub-cubes using a proprietary wireless protocol Cubroid developed. You can too plug the master cube into a PC using micro-USB.

Shin and his two staffers quickly put together a wobbly lilliputian robot with an LED smiley face which tried to barge across the floor, and another giant kaiju-like matter that ended up existence so heavy, he needed to replace the motor blocks with a newer version that had more torque.

The thought here is to balance simplicity and extensibility. Lego Mindstorms lets you build and program with Scratch, but information technology's very fiddly. Other robots like Nuance and Dot, Anki Cosmo and Ozobot are easier to use, just are fixed hardware. Cubroid is extensible, but extremely easy to put together.

On a white board, they've scribbled ideas for the adjacent circular of cubes: a camera, an MP3 actor, an OLED screen. Shin said they're developing an Amazon Alexa-uniform block and a face-recognition block, and they're talking to the Pibo folks about connecting to Pibo's cloud-based system.

"In the time to come, like LittleBits, there could be different kits," he said.

Cubroid blocks

Cubroid'due south next step is to go to the big-league Kickstarter for manufacturing cash, probably one-time this autumn. I'm usually super skeptical virtually Kickstarter, just I know this isn't vaporware and these guys are for existent. They just can, right at present, only beget to make lots of 300 at a time.

"When the Kickstarter money comes, we can make more than," he said.

And they don't seem to be having manufacturing problems. Both Pibo and Cubroid show the reward of starting a new hardware visitor in a country that actually, y'all know, builds hardware. There's a certain US Kickstarter narrative that I call "Center of Darkness," involving United states of america hardware companies that basically become eaten by a predatory China supply chain.

Shin's building his robots in Korea. He's Korean. He speaks Korean. This could piece of work. I hope information technology does. Then we in the US might be hearing more well-nigh Korean tech than just LG, Samsung, and Hyundai.