Friday, November 10, 2006
Posted by Roberto
12:22 AM
0 comments
NEC PERSONAL ROBOT
NEC Corp and NTT Corp have jointly developed a robot called PaPeRo.
This new robot can identify people and verbally communicate with them.
Let's say you are in your office and you want your robot at home to start doing something. You could send an e-mail message to instruct the robot on what to do, or to have the robot to read out the message to specific people in your house (messages are analyzed and comprehended by a computer server that takes care of instructing the robot). Beyond basic tele-parenting / tele-presence functionality, this robot is capable of listening to simultaneous conversations, perform voice recognition, locate people, and recognize faces via stereoscopic vision. I mean... this machine is really powerful!
What can PaPeRo do?
1 | Recognize People
Using image recognition technology, PaPeRo can remember and identify people. It uses stereoscopic vision made possible by the two cameras in its eyes, to know the distance between it and others and move to an appropriate position. It recognizes people by searching for facial features in the original image captured by the cameras and compares them against faces and mouths already in its memory. Once it finds a match, it identifies the person and recalls his/her name, which is also stored in memory.
2 | Understand People
Using voice recognition and synthesizing technologies, PaPeRo can converse with people. It has 8 microphones and a noise canceller to improve and stabilize its voice recognition in noisy environments.
3 | Feel (Touch Sensors)
PaPeRo has 4 touch sensors on its head and 5 around its body. These sensors detect hand contact and when the hand is removed, from which PaPeRo interprets whether it was patted or hit.
4 | Answer the Phone (Built-in Mobile Phone)
PaPeRo has a built-in mobile phone. When a parent calls PaPeRo, PaPeRo locates their child and starts playing with him/her. The telephoning parent can then use the TV conferencing feature of the mobile phone to watch their child playing with PaPeRo via the cameras in PaPeRo's eyes. The parent can also talk to their child using PaPeRo's microphones and speakers.
5 | Understand more than one person at the same time
The PaPe Sack worn by PaPeRo's playmates contains ultrasonic transmitters and wireless microphones. It allows the robot to locate multiple persons and perform simultaneous voice recognition.
Simultaneous Conversations with Voice Recognition
Voices picked up by wireless microphones (located in the PaPe Sack) and are sent to a voice recognition server via the PDA and a wireless LAN, and the results of voice recognition processing done by this server are sent to PaPeRo.
6 | Locate more than one person at the same time
PaPeRo detects where a person is located from the ultrasonic waves emitted by ultrasonic transmitters in the PaPe Sack.
Ultrasonic Tag Locating
PaPeRo first sends ultrasonic wave command specific to the trasmitter by electromagnetic wave and the transmitters that pick it up emit an ultrasonic wave. That ultrasonic wave is picked up by 4 microphones on PaPeRo and PaPeRo computes the tags' positions to within a few centimeters based on the time lag between receptions by the various microphones.
NEC Personal Robot Research Center
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