Tokyo, March 16, 2005
--- NEC Corporation today announced the development of a
new advanced version of its personal partner-type robot "PaPeRo",
PaPeRo 2005, which is capable of more natural communication with
people principally due to improvements in its hearing ability even
within noisy environments and to enhancements in cognitive ability
regarding recognition of handwritten characters and images.
With backing from the New Energy and Industrial Technology
Development Organization ("NEDO"), NEC has been engaged in the
development of a childcare robot as one application of its
partner-type robot. It has thus developed "Childcare Robot PaPeRo"
that boasts enhanced security features and functions enabling it to
play with and watch over children. The Childcare Robot was
developed by using one part of the technological functions of
PaPeRo 2005 and in particular by focusing on interaction between
the robot and children.
As a project commissioned by NEDO, NEC will begin use trials of its
Childcare Robot, consisting of the robot interacting with children
aged between 3 and 12 and technology demonstrations for the general
public. These trials will take place at the Robot Fureai Room in
the Robot Station area of EXPO 2005 AICHI, which is being held from
March 25 to September 25 in Aichi, Japan.
Main features of the enhanced, high-performance PaPeRo, PaPeRo
2005, which incorporates NEC's own technologies, include the
following:
1-Enhanced communication capabilities through improvements in
various cognitive abilities
- Equipped with eight microphones, the speech signal processing
and recognition technology enable the robot to precisely locate the
speech source, and also to recognize and understand commands in a
noisy home environment or even while the robot itself is
talking.
- Handwritten-character recognition technology allows the robot
to read handwritten characters, remember names, and calculate
mathematical formulae.
- Video recognition technology enables a variety of interactions
such as recognition of waving hands and objects such as a moving
pendulum.
2-Enhanced entertainment skills
- Natural and enjoyable interaction between human beings and the
robot were enabled by developing entertainment skills in
collaboration with the Japanese comedian and entertainer,
Zenjiro.
3-Enhanced links among robots and with other remote terminals
via a network
- Development of networking capabilities for improved
connectivity among multiple robots, and between a robot and remote
terminals such as a PC.
4-Performance improvement with new hardware
- New hardware that boosts processing capability and scalability
was developed to enable high-speed execution of various new
technologies.
Features of NEC's Childcare PaPeRo are as follows:
1- Enhanced communication capability targeted at children
- Speech recognition enabled in noisy environments such as
nursery schools, kindergartens, and exhibition halls.
- Simultaneous speech recognition for multiple utterances with
wireless microphones. The robot can recognize what is said by who
out of simultaneous multiple utterances with the help of a special
jacket worn by the child, which is equipped with a wireless
microphone and an ultrasound transmitter.
- Nine touch sensors are mounted on the head and the body of the
robot to achieve various interaction with children from a wide
range of ages, including infants.
2-Enhanced cognitive abilities for recognizing active
children
- Enhanced recognition of children's faces enabling precise
identification of face direction and an enhanced database of
children's faces. Precise face-direction identification is
effective for locating children who can't keep still in front of a
camera.
- An ultrasonic child locator that realizes location of a child
with only an error of a few centimeters within the range of 5
meters by reception of the ultrasounds radiated from the special
jacket worn by the child.
3-Enhancement of play functions that children never tire of
- These extended functions include singing along with the robot,
chatting with the robot, face registration/recognition, robot
quizzes, making greetings, connection with mobile phones, robot
dances, and roll calls. Children can simply enjoy these functions,
or use them to learn and experience various things.
4-Sufficiently safe to interact with children
- Reduced motor power, no-finger-catching design, proximity
sensors, and bumper switches immediately stop the robot upon
detection of contact, realizing safe interaction even with a
three-year-old child.
- Enables remote child monitoring and conversation through the
robot hardware such as its eyes, mouth and ears with the help of a
mobile phone network.
There is great expectation surrounding the development of
partner-type robots, which will be able to live with us and assist
us in our daily lives. Although a variety of robots have been
developed in response to such expectations, they still possess
insufficient performance in terms of speech and image recognition,
in addition to their interaction being monotonous and boring.
Therefore, development of a robot, which enables natural and
enjoyable communication, as well as a wider variety of
interactions, has been highly sought after and desired.
With its enhanced functions, PaPeRo 2005 has overcome the
performance obstacles that the conventional PaPeRo possessed, and
provides new experiences through various human-robot interactions
that are filled with fun and humor.
In addition, Childcare PaPeRo, which will be presented at the EXPO
2005 AICHI, has been developed to specialize in interactions with
children who have strong needs for robots. NEC will continue to
improve the robot's interaction capabilities with children
throughout the period of the EXPO.
NEC believes that the development of PaPeRo2005 and Childcare
PaPeRo, as well as the demonstration and verification of their
technology at EXPO 2005 AICHI, will lead to a wider range of robot
capabilities, higher performance, and development of new
applications. NEC will continue its research and development of
intelligent robot technologies as well as their applications to
achieve commercial viability. In response to customers' demands to
make better products, these new technologies are planned to be
incorporated into the robot software platform, RoboStudio, which is
currently marketed by NEC System Technologies.
NEC Press Contact In Japan
Diane Foley
NEC Corporation
d-foley@ax.jp.nec.com
+81-3-3798-6511
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