[ynak]

I hope 3D printers make this situation better. If robot owners can print broken components that manufacturers stopped producing, they are able to repair their pets by their own. Of course, companies have to open their products information though.

[pizza234]

This is something that I find extremely interesting (in the domain).

I could imagine that having open "intelligence" specifications, would allow transferring the "soul" (as perceived from the owner) of a pet to another, while still mantaining a similar outlook, in order to mantain affective identification.

That, and of course, many other things. I wonder how complex is to build a robot (for a small company), which would still make it realistic enough to create an affective bond. If not too complex, 3D printing would be realistic.

[slfnflctd]

That's the good stuff, right there.

People seem to be hard wired to anthropomorphize anything remotely resembling animal behavior in 3D space. If you can develop trained or environment-reactive specific, repeatable actions (especially useful or amusing ones), along with some narrow-parameter randomized responses (within or adjacent to actions), and migrate those database contents to another robotics platform seamlessly, then you'd really have something.

Kinda surprised this type of thing is still in the 'fizzled' category.

[drzaiusapelord]

If they're not designed to be repairable, this might be a tough nut to crap. How do you repair a IC soldered and black gooped to the circuit board? Or a piece of storage or firmware that's gone bad, but you can source the chip but not the code or the binaries?

[shabble]

Probably in much the same way as other hardware/software systems that weren't intended to be user-serviceable. The obvious comparison is old Arcade Games. There's a fine talk from 31C3[1] about it. You need to extract firmware from working systems, reverse engineer any custom chips & hardware, and duplicate/emulate it with sufficient fidelity to work with the rest of the system.

One difference here is that the critters have 'personality' which is developed over time and stored onboard somewhere in flash or eeprom. You'd need to find a way to back up or dump that data easily enough that everyone could do it regularly, because once it breaks it might be too late.

It's akin to preserving not only the arcade game, but also the high-scores table from your particular cabinet.

[1] http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_5997_-_en_-_...

[emodendroket]

Well, as they currently exist, they can only create things entirely made from plastic, so I don't think they'd be too helpful.

[detaro]

The printers people can afford for at home, yes. 3D printing companies like Shapeways will do your designs in many other materials as well, including steel.

[joshuapants]

I'm hoping that someday we'll be able to print integrated circuits and other components right onto a board. You may be able to print out a new joint for your robo-dog's leg, but if some capacitors blow and it's all SMD repair is a lot harder at present.