Contact:
Teresa Bridwell
Idealab for Evolution Robotics
(626) 535-2886
teresa@idealab.com

Stephan West
Idealab for Evolution Robotics
(626) 685-4934
stephan@idealab.com

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Yujin Robot Adds Breakthrough Vision to its iRobiQ Personal Robot

Seoul, Korea & Pasadena, Calif. – January 28, 2008 – Yujin Robot, Korea's leading robotics company, announced today that the latest version of its trend-setting iRobiQ personal robot will be powered by Evolution Robotics' ViPR® vision technology. The addition of ViPR will enable iRobiQ to truly "see" and intelligently interact with people and its environment. To take advantage of ViPR's unique capabilities, Yujin is developing an entirely new user interface and set of educational applications, which will include programs to help children read books, learn characters and languages, build math skills and play other learning games. The enhanced version of iRobiQ with ViPR will launch in early 2008.

iRobiQ is the latest in Yujin's vanguard line of personal robots. iRobiQ was used in a national pilot program in Korea earlier in 2007 to evaluate the use and benefit of robots in the home. In the study, iRobiQ earned praise from parents and children alike and scored high ratings from project officials on quality, reliability and usability. Based on the results, Yujin will be launching an upgraded version of iRobiQ in Korea in early 2008, and has entered into a distribution agreement with a partner to sell iRobiQ in China later in the year.

"We are very excited about the response to iRobiQ and the opportunities it offers as a new platform for a variety of home applications," said Dr. Kyung Chul Shin, CEO of Yujin Robot. "Evolution Robotics solves the truly hard problems in making robotics work seamlessly in everyday settings, which is what our customers for iRobiQ expect. Their ViPR solution showed far superior performance against other visual recognition systems we evaluated for iRobiQ, even ones that were much more expensive."

Unlike vision systems used in industrial applications which require expensive cameras, provide limited functionality and work only under highly specific conditions, ViPR is designed for enabling sight in the real world. It was first deployed on a consumer product on the Sony Aibo in 2003, and is now on over 2 million products around the world. The most recent use is on mobile phones, where for example NTT DoCoMo customers in Japan can use their camera phone to take pictures of movie posters, music CDs and even wine labels to order tickets, download ring tones and mp3's and get product reviews, all with just one quick snap shot.

"ViPR is designed to see and recognize objects in much the same way people do," said Dr. Paolo Pirjanian, President and CEO of Evolution Robotics. "It is a very natural fit to use ViPR for learning applications on a product such as iRobiQ, where providing a rich robot to human interaction is such a central part of the product experience."

As an example, ViPR will enable iRobiQ to recognize the page of a story book, even if the child is holding the book upside down and only has part of it in view of the robot's camera. Likewise, ViPR will work even if when the light in the room is poor, or goes from dark to bright as the robot moves around.

iRobiQ version 2008 is slated to go on sale in Korea in 1st quarter 2008, For more information, please visit: http://www.yujinrobot.com.

About Yujin Robot

Yujin Robot Co. Ltd., has been a leading company in the area of industrial robots, MEMS test handlers and manufacturing automation systems with the state of the art technology for more than 15 years. The company moves forward to intelligent robots to realize intelligent life with robots for a broad variety of product categories, from personal robots, utility robots and military applications.

About Evolution Robotics

Evolution Robotics, Inc. is based in Pasadena, CA, and partners with brand leaders to make their products smarter by providing solutions for vision, autonomous navigation and intelligence. These technologies are used worldwide for commercial and consumer use including robotics toys, robotic vacuum cleaners, cell phone applications, and grocery loss prevention together with partners including Sony, Bandai, Sharper Image, and ER Retail. ER Retail is a wholly owned subsidiary of Evolution Robotics, Inc. Evolution Robotics is an operating company of Idealab, a creator and operator of technology businesses. (http://www.evolution.com).

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