Tokyo 2015: Toyota’s Kirobo mini is your cupholder companion
Pocket-sized robot designed to keep you company, and keep you happy, when you drive
Alongside concepts of the four-wheeled kind, Toyota unveiled the Kirobo mini, a pocket-sized humanoid designed to be your shotgun when you’re driving solo.
Weighing 200g, the Kirobo mini measures 100mm tall and 77mm wide. It responds to voice and gestures, using a built-in camera, and Toyota says that it will eventually be able to recognise human emotions and respond accordingly.
It’s fully portable, but when you take it for a drive, it sits in a colour-coded sleeping bag so you can stuff it into a cupholder.
Pseudo-human in form, the Kirobo mini has large eyes that illuminate yellow, while the mouth glows red when it talks. The robot also has a red glow from behind the Toyota logo on its chest akin to ET the extra terrestrial.
The robot is part of the Toyota Heart Project, a collaborative effort between Toyota and a number of Japanese tech firms and universities that are exploring deeper man-machine relationships that launched in 2013.
The Kirobo mini is the smaller sibling to the Kirobo robot that was sent up to the International Space Station in 2013. Also a joint project, Toyota created the voice recognition for the robot.
