Pomi: the smelly, emotional robot penguin from Korea

Meet Pomi the robot penguin. Pomi is the latest robotic companion from the Korean state run Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI). Pomi can see, hear, touch, make faces and also emit two different smells depending on its mood.

What these smells are is another question. Does it give off little penguin chuffs when it’s nervous or bad breath when it’s angry, and just what kind of smell does one emit when one is happy? The other thing is do you really want to be around an animal with a fish based diet when it’s giving off gas?

Pomi, which is short for Penguin Robot for Multimodal Interaction despite that spelling “Prmi”, is part of ETRI’s plan to make more intelligent service robots. It comes with voice recognition as well as a heart-box that will speed up and slow down depending on its mood and whether you’ve been touching it, apparently.

Pomi will be available by the end of next month and is the latest robot companion from ETRI after Kobie the koala and Rabie the rabbit. I eagerly await Eric the elephant seal and all the wonderful smells he’ll be producing.

(via The Raw Feed)

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