Man best friend in Japan always had a different meaning. It started when Sony introduced Aibo back in 1999 to the world. Aibo was a cute robot dog, which knew how to perform basic operations such as walking and recognizing voice commands.

Unfortunately, Sony eventually decided to cease Aibo production after 170,000 dogs sold. Although Aibo was considered a huge hit in Japan. Now a group of Japanese scientists want to create a more advanced robot dog.

The dog, “Hon Hon”, was introduced last week at Chiba’s Techno-Frontier 2008 symposium which shows technology projects from around Japan. You can see Hon Hon in action right here:

And if you want, you can always enjoy an Aibo playing with a cat:

And if you are into robotic dinosaurs, you should really take a look at Pleo.

Source (Japanese Translated): [Robot Watch]

Japanese people are crazy about robots. There are helper robots for lifting cargo, receptions robots, and of course fun robots like Sony’s Aibo (discontinued) or Honda’s Asimo. But researches in Toshiba have finally found the most important task for sophisticated robots to handle: change TV channels.

Meet ApriPoko, a voice operated robot with remote control capabilities for multiple home appliances. The robot sits in your living room quietly and try to detect Infra Red beams around him.

When it detects such beams, he kindly asks if you like him to learn this operation from the remote you are currently using. When you answer him something like “I’ve turned on the stereo”, it will memorize the commands and you’ll be able to command him to do this again, using only your voice.

So what do we got here in the end? a 5lb robot, that his only purpose in life is to respond to Japanese commands on their home equipment. It still in development, so no word on pricing yet, but you can assume it will be in the hundreds of dollars range. Our guess? Japanese shoppers will buy this like crazy, even they already have a hyper-remote control that can send commands to the entire systems in the house.

More on [Akihabara News]