(Photo from Danny Ghitis for the Wall Street Journal)

October 11 is the opening day for the humanoid robots at the Westport, Connecticut library. On September 29 the Wall Street Journal’s Loretta Waldman wrote an article on the robots. See http://online.wsj.com/articles/coming-soon-to-the-library-humanoid-robots-1412015687. The article and the accompanying video are well worth watching.

The robots featured in Westport are from the French company Aldebaran. The cost of these Aldebaran robots is roughly $8,000 a piece, while Google’s Finch robots sell for $99. Please note that WSJ did not mention the Dash & Dot robots that I learned about in Entrepreneur magazine, those robots are from Wonder Workshop (formerly known as Play-i). The pricing at Wonder Workshop is a little higher than Google’s, but if you just buy Dot it only costs about $60. I don’t believe that price is the full story as functionality in terms of what the robots can do varies among these three robotics providers. It could be a case of the more money you spend the more functionality your robot has.

Anybody out there in library land want to comment?