Description
Behavior firmware from one of the first household robots sold to look after children.
The RB series could not speak. It communicated by gesture, played simple games and was designed above all to keep a child safe. Its firmware includes a library of stories it could be asked to have read aloud to it.
Provenance
Read from a unit retired by the Weston family after twenty-two years in their household, and released for access by its manufacturer.
The family asked that the robot’s story library be kept. Its logs show one story was requested several thousand times.
Preservation
- Fixity (SHA-256)
23c308e7fe5eae24877c6b8ace5d210a34195e168ddac0735a7c54b7cea3eba3- Last verified
- Oct 27, 2026, by Vigil
- Emulation profile
- LZE-ROBOT-2 · lz-mcu core
- Copies
- Three, on two kinds of storage, in two cities
- Original carriers
- Kept in cold storage in Vancouver
Access
Free, in the Lazarus reading room in Vancouver and in partner reading rooms.
In the reading room it runs in emulation under profile LZE-ROBOT-2, from a read-only copy of the recovered image, as it would have on household robots.
Cite as: U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, RB-series nursemaid robot: behavior firmware (1996). Lazarus Archive, LZ-24940.