Country France
Japan Type Humanoid | Year of creation 2014 prototype | |
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Manufacturer Aldebaran Robotics (now SoftBank Robotics) Purpose Technology demonstrator Website www.aldebaran.com/en/a-robots/who-is-pepper | ||
Pepper is a humanoid robot by Aldebaran Robotics and SoftBank designed with the ability to read emotions. It was introduced in a conference on 5 June 2014, and was showcased in Softbank mobile phone stores in Japan beginning the next day. It was scheduled to be available in February 2015 at a base price of JPY 198,000 ($1,931) at Softbank Mobile stores. Pepper's emotion comes from the ability to analyze expressions and voice tones.
Contents
Design
The robot’s head has four microphones, two HD cameras (in the mouth and forehead), and a 3-D depth sensor (behind the eyes). There is a gyroscope in the torso and touch sensors in the head and hands. The mobile base has two sonars, six lasers, three bumper sensors, and a gyroscope.
It is able to run the existing content in the app store designed for Aldebaran's other robot, Nao.
Purpose
Pepper is not a functional robot for domestic use. Instead, Pepper is intended "to make people happy", enhance people's lives, facilitate relationships, have fun with people and connect people with the outside world. Pepper's creators hope that independent developers will create new content and uses for Pepper.
Research
Pepper is available as a research robot for schools, colleges and universities to teach programming and conduct research into human-robot interactions. In the United Kingdom, it is available through Rapid Electronics Limited for this purpose.