Robots Move from the Exhibit Floor to Homes, Offices, Hospitals
Photo: AUVSI.
Several of the robots on display at Innorobo 2015 in Lyon, France, are making their way to market and into homes, offices and hospitals, with many of them starting in robot-friendly Japan.
One is the new robot from Paris-based Aldebaran Robotics, named Pepper. The company developed Pepper for the Japanese telecom and Internet giant SoftBank Group, which wants to distribute fleets of them to a wide variety of businesses.
The robots also went on sale to consumers in Japan on June 20. According to Aurore Chiquot, Aldebaran’s public relations manager, they sold all 1,000 robots in one minute.
Pepper is a diminutive humanoid robot that rolls around on a wheeled base. Like the company’s smaller Nao robot, it can dance and speaks several languages, although the one on the Innorobo exhibit floor was partial to French and declined to switch to English when asked.
Chiquot said the robot is “like a cell phone,” in that owners can download different apps to help it do different things. There’s no programming connection to the robot, but instead people communicate through voice and gestures. If you tap one of the bumpers near its wheels, it will look to see if it has bumped into anything.
Softbank Group already operates Pepper in more than 140 of its Softbank Mobile stores in Japan, where the robots greet, educate and entertain shoppers. The company owns 95 percent of Aldebaran, which is now part of the SoftBank Group.
Another robot entering the market, although in a more specialized way, is Paro, the robot seal developed by Japan’s Advanced Industrial Science and Technology company, or AIST.
Paro’s inventor, Takanori Shibata, has worked on the concept of a therapeutic robotic pet since 1993 and has continually refined the result. Paro is now on its ninth version and has been exported from Japan since 2005.
The original Paros were more complicated than they needed to be, as they were capable of moving around. Shibata said that wasn’t really needed, so he simplified the design and refined it over the years to make it more production ready and to take advantage of user feedback.
Paro is used for elderly patients, including those with dementia, as well as children with autism and other conditions. Like a real pet, Paro responds to their moods and helps calm them, Shibata said, but without the expense of using a real animal. Paro can respond to touch, purr, blink its eyes, make sounds and adjust its body temperature.
More than 3,000 of the seals are now in use in hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities around the world, and were introduced into France’s medical system last year.
The Parisian hospital system evaluated the robot and “found Paro is very good for cancer patients, for palliative care,” Shibata said.
Drones Everywhere
Several companies outlined their plans to make small unmanned aircraft more aware of their surroundings, rather than just relying on remote control to operate.
David Scaramuzza, of the University of Zurich’s Robotics and Perception Group, said he has been working on a system using onboard optics to quickly scan and map a drone’s surroundings as it flies through.
“GPS does not work indoors, so how can you deal with situations like this that are not line of sight?” he said.
His system uses “keyframe” photos and then compares the drone’s position to them. So far, he says the mapping system has proven to be “very fast — it’s faster than the camera itself.” He plans to test it by mapping the cluttered, dimly lit tunnels of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland.
Sebastian Courroux of France’s Novadem described his company’s new local positioning system, which enabled it to carry out a recent bridge inspection without the use of GPS. The LPS system proved to be more precise when compared to a similar inspection using GPS, he said.
LPS relies on beacons, or tags, that are placed on the ground and used to locate the UAS in place of satellites. The bridge inspection was carried out in December 2014, and an indoor test flight was conducted in Rognac, France, with similar good results, Courroux said. That flight used five beacons to help locate the aircraft using radio frequencies.
The LPS system allows the UAS to achieve an accuracy of 10 centimeters in three dimensions, he said.
