Improvements in the native development environment for Sony AIBO

Abstract

— The entertainment robotics have been on a peak with AIBO, but this robot brand has been discontinued by the Sony in 2006 to help its financial position. Among other reasons, the robot failed to enter into both the mainstream and the robotics research labs besides the RoboCup competitions, however, there were some attempts to use the robot for rehabilitation and emotional medical treatments. A native software development environment (Open-R SDK) was provided to program AIBO, nevertheless, the operating system (Aperios) induced difficulties for the students and the researchers in the software development. The author of this paper made efforts to update the Open-R and overcome the problems. More enhancements have been implemented in the core components, some software methodologies were applied to solve a number of restrictions and the achievements are summarized here.