The design of our robot REEM: a well studied topic
Hi, I am Jan, and I am the Business Developer here in PAL Robotics. A very challenging job, in a company loaded with very intelligent and ambitious engineers, and in a world where we are at the very early stage of introducing robotics in society. I just want to share a couple of words with you on one of the main issues of our robots: its design.
My task here is to sell these cute robots we make. But…how do you sell a robot? Many references from the market I did not get – there are for the moment not too much robots around, which, in a certain way, is good for us! So we did a careful study to check what´s been done, and what failed and why and so on…and actually quite soon you find out that all these smart engineers worldwide make wonderful pieces of technology, but quite often they lack a nice design.
Why do so many people buy iPods and iPhones (see www.apple.com)? Because it is such a sleaky, slim and sexy tool! Yes, definitely in the case of Apple´s bestseller, the design is not the only, but a very important sales argument. And what counts for Apple, counts for a lot of brands and products.
So, why do robots not sell like iPods? ;) Well, there are of course hundreds of reasons (lack of offer, price, security, applications,…) , but one fact is surely people do not feel comfortable yet with robots, a.o. because the physical outlooks of the robots are not very attractive, and because they do not invite people to interact with the robot.
We spend a lot of time and effort in looking for a very aesthetical outlook for REEM, our latest prototype. Just to give you an idea; we organized public demonstrations (although with another model) to check out the reactions of the public (you can see some videos of these on our website, we paid attention to the movements of the robot and how that influences the interaction with people and we gave it a soft voice which is nice to listen to.
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The result you will be able to see on both our blog and website – I hope you like it!
Please note that the design of REEM has been developed in-house, contrary to the design of REEM-C, the new biped robot, for which we have a contest running on our blog.
