Investing in Jibo Acer wants to develop IoT robotics

Sep 4, 2015 12:32 GMT  ·  By

After the successful launch of new products at IFA 2015, including the new Predator gaming-dedicated line that includes a gaming smartphone, a gaming tablet, desktop and two gaming laptops.

Additionally, the company has launched the already famous Revo modular PC that made quite a stir during the IFA conference, impressing the audience with its look and simplicity. Having quite a success in entry-level smartphones and desktop computing, the company decided that the company is planning to invest in a firm that is mainly focused on robot R&D.

According to DigiTimes, Acer CEO Jason Chen revealed that the company wants to make the step into robotics before the end of 2015, but he acknowledges that the business requires time to mature, and will not bring any profit to Acer two or three years from now.

Acer will be part of Jibo's launch in Asia

It seems that the company wants to join forces with Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Media Lab in developing the home-use robot Jibo. Announced last year, Jibo became an online sensation and managed to gather more than $3 million on Indiegogo.

The small robot is being marketed as the perfect family robot, with a strong reminiscence of Eve, from Pixar’s Wall-E. Right now, the small robot is in prototype phase and Cynthia Breazeal, the project's initiator, plans to fulfill pre-orders in the April/May 2016 timeframe on a first-ordered, first-received basis.

Seeing the potential of the small machine, Japan's KDDI and Korea's LG also invested in the project, with Acer being the latest company to join the project.

Chen said that it wanted Acer to join Jibo's sales system in Asia, and associate the brand somehow with the small robot. Besides Jibo, however, Acer wants the new robotics R&D company to evolve in the enterprise sector, developing around Acer's Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem and not industrial-use robotic arms.