Pikadoll

Important: I should have mentioned this earlier when I made the page, but I'm not sure if this counts as a robot. Despite news articles I've gone through referring to it as a robot, I feel uncertain, since the toy has no movement. I see it as just a microcomputer with buttons and voice recognition, but I added it to the robots list page anyways.

Pikadoll aka Pikaduo (pronounced as: Píkǎduō, and written as 皮卡多 in Chinese) is an educational, entertainment robot(?) by Mygym Education Technology Co., LTD. While it isn't known for sure how much the toy sold for, the estimated price for the toy before its launch was 599 yuan.

Appearance

Lee Seung Hyun (李承贤), the CEO of Mygym, read a National Geographic magazine which mentioned an endangered species known as the ‘Ili pika’. It had been missing for more than 20 years, but was found again in Zinjiang, China. An article about the species going missing can be found here (it was published in 2015). Having read about the endangered creature, he realized he could design the toy to look like an Ili pika to raise awareness about them. He had also asked the children of his friends about the Ili pika, and they liked it.

The toy has a piece of plastic on its face that is almost square-shaped, and a rectangular LCD screen which features digital, blue eyes. It has a glowing, round plastic nose, and the right and left sides of its face near its nose are plastic buttons. It has a pair of plush, mouse-like ears, and a plush head. Its legs and body also appear to be plush.

Color Schemes

The toy is known to have been created in three color schemes, including one that was used for a prototype.

It can come in blue, with a white mouth area or in a fully red color scheme. The prototype has red fur, a beige mouth, and a black, plastic snout. Unlike the released product, the prototype’s mouth area is plush and its nose does not light-up.

Functions

The toy connects to a cloud server to retrieve data for features such as nursery rhymes, idioms, jokes, songs, stories, etc. According to a Sohu article, the toy can make more than 20 different expressions, with a cloud connection. When information is crawled from the net, the content is manually reviewed and simplified so children can easily understand it, before it becomes accessible via the cloud. Children can ask Pikadoll questions or say a noun to get Pikadoll to fetch content from the cloud. For example, you can ask Pikadoll to play rock music, and it will. Pikadoll can not only perform tasks, but speak. When fetching information on a topic, Pikadoll can tell you information about a topic you want to know about.

If Pikadoll is in sleep mode, you can call its name before giving it a command. If it is not in sleep mode, and if a command is not being issued, it could ask you "What are you doing?".

Pikadoll has parental controls that can allow Pikadoll to give a certain answer to certain questions a child asks, and you can set a timer which will restrict the amount of time a child can play with Pikadoll.

Cloud Computing Award

This probably isn't so relevant, but Mygym won two cloud computing awards. One of them is the Cloud China 2016 Yunfan award from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the other is the 2015-2016 Cloud Computing Excellent Solution/Product award (not sure if this award name is correct). A photo of the certificate for the second award with two Pikadolls and an interactive Shaun the Sheep toy is pictured above.

Links