The French company worked in secret for two years to create Pepper.
Now Japanese telecom giant SoftBank is ready to sell it to consumers
The robot seems determined to put a bigger smile on
the man’s face. “Are you smiling from the bottom of your heart?” it
asks. The man chuckles. “That’s what I’m talking about,” the robot quips
in a high-pitched voice. Then, just for good measure, it bows its
plastic head and apologizes for being “too bossy to our CEO.”
The CEO is Masayoshi Son, founder and chairman of telecom giant
SoftBank and Japan’s richest person. As such, he has overseen the
development of hundreds of new products as part of a vast conglomerate
of mobile-phone carriers, Internet ventures, and media companies. But
last June, at a press conference outside Tokyo, Son climbed onstage to unveil a pet project: a humanoid robot named Pepper.
Designed to be a companion in the home, it is the world’s first
full-scale humanoid to be offered to consumers. In February, SoftBank
plans to start selling it in Japan for 198,000 yen (less than US
$2,000), plus a monthly subscription fee. Taiwanese electronics
manufacturer Foxconn, known for building iPhones and iPads for Apple,
will produce the robots.
For that kind of money, don’t expect anything like Rosie, the robot maid from “The Jetsons.” What you’ll get is a two-armed, 1.2-meter-tall robot that rolls around on a wheeled base. It can dance and gesture with some grace,
but its manipulation skills are limited, and it’s unclear how much
autonomy the robot has; at the launch event, most of its actions were
clearly preprogrammed. At home, Pepper won’t be able to fold your
laundry or clear the dinner table.
And that’s fine with SoftBank, which says Pepper is not a utilitarian
automaton. It is designed to provide advice and company: It’ll tell you
jokes, play games with you, teach you a new subject, and help you
communicate with family and friends. Pepper will read a recipe aloud
while you do the cooking. Onstage with Son, it spoke Japanese, but it is also fluent in English, French, and Spanish.
To do all that, the robot is equipped with an “emotion
engine”—software that attempts to infer how a user is feeling based on
facial expressions, tone of voice, and speech, allowing the robot to
respond accordingly. If you arrive home and look a bit down, Pepper will
play your favorite song, for instance. “We want to have a robot that
maximizes joy and minimizes sadness,” Son said.
SoftBank is betting that people are ready for that kind of experience. Humanoids have long captured our imaginations, but until now they’ve been notably absent from our homes, where the only robotic inhabitants you’ll find today are small mechatronic toys and Roomba vacuum cleaners.
It’s still too early to tell whether Pepper will be a hit, but its
arrival may be a sign that robotics technology is beginning to catch up
with science fiction.
It seems natural that Japan, a nation known for its love of
everything robotic, would be the first market for a home humanoid. But
it may come as a surprise that SoftBank, as it sought partners to
develop Pepper, didn’t join forces with Honda, Sony, Toyota, or any
other big Japanese company with robotics expertise. Instead, it turned
to a much smaller and lesser-known French robotics firm called Aldebaran.
Tucked in a narrow tree-lined street on the
southwest edge of Paris, Aldebaran’s headquarters occupies several
floors of a modern office building. Robots and humans mingle casually as
if in a scene from Star Wars. A Pepper robot greets employees
near the coffee machine. Another—wearing a blond wig that someone
thought would make for a stylish upgrade—watches people going by in a
hallway. In a glass-walled room, a dozen robots speak and roam
aimlessly, testing their own endurance.
I approach a Pepper and strike up a conversation, but the robot
doesn’t seem to get what I’m saying. An employee comes over and tells
the robot to speak English. VoilĂ ! Now Pepper and I can understand each
other—sort of. When I ask the robot what it is capable of doing, it
responds by describing a game it wants to play. The employee shows me
how to improve my human-robot interaction skills: I have to look at
Pepper’s face and speak more clearly. I ask again what it can do. “I can
do lots of things,” this Pepper tells me, “because the engineers who
programmed me are very smart.”
SoftBank seems to agree. Four years ago, Masayoshi Son decided he
wanted robotics to be part of his vast business empire, and he sent
emissaries to evaluate the world’s top robotics companies. Aldebaran,
despite being relatively small, stood out in its ability to design
robots that offer a highly interactive experience. Aldebaran’s flagship
robot is a knee-high humanoid called Nao.
More than 6,000 Naos are now used in research labs, schools, and
hospitals in 70 countries. Longer term, the company is also developing a
1.4-meter-tall legged humanoid called Romeo.
“The most important role of robots will be as kind and emotional
companions to enhance our daily lives, to bring happiness, to surprise
us, to help people grow,” says Aldebaran founder and CEO Bruno Maisonnier, an executive who quit a career in finance to pursue his dream of creating robots for everyone.
Son and Maisonnier met and realized they shared the vision of taking
robots out of the lab and into everyday life. Together, they could do
something for robotics “that could be really world changing,” Maisonnier
recalls thinking. In early 2012, SoftBank acquired a majority stake in Aldebaran
and agreed to fund the company’s growth. For Aldebaran, the acquisition
meant that nearly overnight, the company had to focus almost
exclusively on the Pepper project.
SoftBank gave
Aldebaran just three months to build the first prototype, and after
that it demanded to see a demonstration every two or three months.
Aldebaran’s strategy was to build on its experience with Nao and develop
a “stretched up” version of the smaller humanoid. As an example, Rodolphe Gelin,
Aldebaran’s research director, says the engineers adapted the joint
mechanisms in Nao’s arms for use in Pepper. “Our robots share many
things in common, and that allowed us to do things in a time frame that
otherwise would be impossible,” he says.
A team of designers and artists created a sleek, friendly looking
shell for the robot. And the engineering team stuffed its body with 20
electric motors, an Intel Atom–based computer, two cameras, a 3-D
sensor, four microphones, and a lithium-ion battery that lets Pepper run
for 12 hours. A tablet on the robot’s chest displays information and
provides another way to interact with the robot.
Gwennael Gate, one of the software directors, says that a big
challenge was dealing with the robot’s huge computing needs while
“making sure that the CPU is not exploding.” Each function is controlled
by one of about 20 software engines. If you’re standing far from the
robot, for instance, its awareness engine makes the robot move its head
and emit sounds to try to get your attention. If you come closer, a dialogue engine kicks in, so you and Pepper can have a conversation. If you ask the robot to dance, a motion engine takes over.
In Aldebaran’s first trip to SoftBank’s Tokyo headquarters, in April
2012, the engineers gathered in a room filled with Japanese
executives. Suddenly, the doors opened and everyone went silent.
Masayoshi Son entered, took a seat, and stared at the Pepper prototype
in front of him. The first demo was simple enough: The engineers turned
the robot on, and it did a little dance. Almost immediately, Son was
“like a kid,” beaming at the robot, an Aldebaran engineer told me.
What followed was an intense two years for the
French company. Engineers worked day and night, with no breaks for
weekends or holidays. “Aldebaran never slept during this period,” Gate
said. The head count ballooned to 500 people at one point, with offices
expanding not only at the Paris headquarters but also in Tokyo, Boston,
and Shanghai. The work culminated in the demo of all demos: the highly
produced, Apple-esque launch, where Son would introduce Pepper to the world. Aldebaran and SoftBank rehearsed the event several times a day for an entire month, using stand-ins for Son and Maisonnier.
The emotion engine, which Son highlighted in the event, uses the
robot’s vision system to detect smiles, frowns, and surprise, and it
uses speech recognition to sense the tone of voice and to detect certain
words indicative of strong feelings, like “love” and “hate.” The engine
then computes a numeric score that quantifies the person’s overall
emotion as positive or negative.
Aldebaran admits the system is not very sophisticated, but the
company promises that it will improve. In the future, the system could
also incorporate ethics, empathy, and other qualities and behaviors that
the company believes robots need in order to be part of people’s lives.
The emotion engine is something Maisonnier wants “embedded at the core
of our humanoid operating system, because it defines who our robots are
and how they behave.”
Not everyone is convinced that people will want a Pepper at home—at least not until the robot can do some actual chores. The robot will have “a very difficult time getting off the ground as a viable consumer product,” a robotics observer told PCWorld.
Others have accused SoftBank of hyping Pepper’s capabilities. The
technology website The Verge found the robot’s emotion-recognition
skills disappointing, saying that “Pepper has a heart of COBOL.”
SoftBank counters that it is pricing the robot very aggressively,
which should help drive demand. Indeed, Son says he’s willing to lose
money selling the robots until the company can ramp up volume and reduce
costs—a strategy he’s used successfully in the mobile industry. Still,
it’s unclear whether consumers will be convinced of Pepper’s
usefulness, especially outside Japan. SoftBank has yet to articulate its
plans for international sales.
Maisonnier says Pepper will become more capable over time, as
developers create new applications for it. Users will then be able to
download and install these new functionalities, just as they add new
apps to their smartphones. “The most important thing is to have a huge
community of people trying, experimenting,” he says. “This community
will create the applications that will make the next wave of people want
to have the robot.”
Last September, SoftBank and Aldebaran held a developers conference in Tokyo, where they revealed details about Pepper’s technology and a set of software-development tools. A thousand attendees showed up, 600 of whom preordered a robot.
And while Aldebaran will continue working to make its existing robots
smarter and more capable, it doesn’t plan to stop there. With the
experience it gained developing Pepper, the company wants to build new
robots for other customers—a strategy that SoftBank supports. Aldebaran
doesn’t yet know what these Pepper cousins will look like, but it’s
exploring ideas with banks, insurance companies, and retail stores.
Maisonnier believes Pepper’s debut is the beginning of a revolution
whose effects will eventually be of the same magnitude as those of the
PC, the Internet, and mobile phones. “People want robots, and they’re
frustrated because there are no robots,” he says. “We’re going to give people the robots they’ve been waiting for.”
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