Apripoco & Apripetit
The main idea of this new section is showing Cool Robots that industry or people does, showing why I like them and trying to learn something new about their design.
In this post I would like to present Apripoco & his little brother Apripetit. Toshiba has developed a prototype robot that is essentially works as a universal remote for your home. The idea behind this robot is controling devices symply asking Apripoco to control it.
1) Apripoco
Turning on the TV is not the only thing it will be able to do for you either. It will be able to do anything an infrared remote can, but in a more personal way, since you are its teacher. Giving the robot a child like appearance has proved to work well in trials, especially with older users. “The ApriPoco is believed to be useful for elderly people who tend to shun the complicated functions of household electronics” said Toshiba.
This robot was released in 2009 and I haven┬┤t seen it available yet so I am afraid it won’t arrive to Europe.
2) Apripetit
Toshiba’s R&D Center unveiled a new version in their line of prototype household robots at ROBOMEC 2012 (May 27th~29th). The aptly-named ApriPetit is almost half the size of the previous prototype, standing just 15 cm (5.9 inches) tall. It’s so small that you can easily hold it in the palm of your hand, so Toshiba is describing it as a portable robotic interface. That kind of close interaction has the side effect of facilitating better speech recognition. It can banter with you using a combination of speech recognition and text-to-speech software. Although the technology hasn’t been commercialized, the prototypes have found their way into a number of research labs.
Given that this is a communication robot (one possible use is in home care reminding the elderly to take their medication), eye contact is considered very important. The ApriPetit’s enormous eyes contain functional stereo cameras, which can find and recognize faces and determine how close they are. The ApriPoco used a distance sensor to help determine a people proximity, but this has not yet been implemented in ApriPetit (perhaps due to its compact form).
Toshiba is considering possible applications including supplying the robot to cloud service providers, allowing various services to be piped to the home through the robot. It’s great to see that despite some 10 years of research Toshiba hasn’t given up on their “Advanced Personal Robots with Intelligence”. However, I must admit that I prefer ApriPoco’s overall shape and its cute little arms, which together make it look a bit like a baby turtle.
