Robotics is an emerging but segmented market ranging from industrial applications to elderly care to home appliances. The personal robotics market is divided into two major segments: robot toys and advanced robots. Robot toys are built to be as cheap as possible and therefore offer only a limited set of features resulting in predictable behaviour and user interaction. Advanced robots offer a rich set of interaction, but this comes at a price that is too hight for consumers. ixi-Play is an attempt to build an advanced, yet affordable robot for the consumer domain using both smartphone technology and design principles from industrial robotics. Android is chosen as OS because it not only offers advanced features like image and speech recognition, but also opens the possibly for developers to make their own apps.

In this presentation aspects like user requirement specification, technology development, Android OS, real-time vs. non-real-time performance, user testing and market approach are covered.