Banryu Available to Guard Your HomePosted 7 Mar 2004 at 20:12 UTC by steve 
tmsuk originally made conveyor
belts for fishing trawlers, then they switched to making rice balls. Now
they're developing robots. The tmsuk home guarding robot, Banryu, first started making news about
year ago (you may remember it from some of the photo galleries in our Robodex 2003 coverage).
According to a new asahi.com story, Banryu may finally be
available for purchase. Roland
Piquepaille's weblog contains a number of new photos and more
details on Banryu. The 35 kg, 4-legged robot has over 50 sensors and can
alert it's owner by cell phone if it detects a fire or an intruder. The
cost? 1.98
million yen (about $17,600).
$18,000 bucks, forget it. Too expensive for me.
The burglers would either drop kick it up off the wall or steal it
themselves.
When I think about it, I could probably build one for a lot less.
You can use a MCU, a room motion detector, a modem, and have it dial up
your cell phone messaging service and email you a text message to your
cell phone.
Cost would be whatever you have in your junk box already or how much
full cost you'd want to spend. Defintely not more than a few hundred.
I think they've got articles on this using the Parallax Basic Stamps
too.
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