Perhaps more than any other nation, Japan sees robots in all manner of roles in public and private life, but it was apparent in a recent demonstration that there is still plenty of work to do before those roles become reality.

Japanese companies, including NEC Corp., Honda Motor Co. Ltd. and Sony Corp. have said for some time that before too long robots will evolve into useful tools, helping people in everyday life. Honda and Sony are the makers of what are arguably Japan’s most famous robots, Asimo and Qrio, respectively. Those companies are developing “partner” robots that will help around the house, for example, performing tasks such as vacuum cleaning and item-fetching, and — eventually — to soothe, amuse and even care for the nation’s elderly.

The number of Japanese who are over 65 years old is expected to rise from about one in five in 2002 to about one in three by 2050, according to the Japanese government. As the number of productive workers shrinks, robots are seen as potential replacement caregivers for both the young and the old.

For example, Honda is developing robots that can monitor the whereabouts of, communicate with and even carry elderly people around their homes, acting as wearable “power suits” to support limbs. NEC sees cute ‘bots as both educating and entertaining children via interactive activities.

Honda says it wants to commercialize home-help robots as soon as possible, according to company spokesman Yasuhiro Nakamoto. Sony hopes to sell robots for home use in about a decade or so, said Takashi Uehara, a company spokesman.

At the current state of development, Asimo can jog, albeit slowly. Qrio can’t do that, but, like Asimo, it talks and dances. Those abilities will allow the robot to “act as a partner at one’s home,” according to Sony.

For its part, NEC has been busy improving its robots since its first prototype in 1997. The latest, called PaPeRo2005, has relatively advanced communicative abilities that should help robots become more than mere toys, according to the company.

As NEC says in a press release about PaPeRo, robots “still possess insufficient performance in terms of speech and image recognition, in addition to their interaction being monotonous and boring.”

So the rationale behind developing PaPeRo is precisely to move robot abilities to a new level. For example, PaPeRo can differentiate voice commands from background noise, interact with people by recognizing gestures and individuals in crowds, read handwriting and even crack jokes, according to the company.

But not all the time, not everywhere, not quite yet, it seems.

In a recent demonstration, PaPeRo completed many of its tasks, but was far from perfect. It seemed confused by some commands and talked its way through a demonstration unaware that the projector showing the accompanying visuals wasn’t working. The projector also blinded another robot’s charge coupled device camera-eyes so it couldn’t respond to hand gestures immediately, as did the flash of cameras during a demonstration showing the ‘bot’s ability to respond to a pendulum.

While NEC says the demonstrations didn’t really amount to glitches, PaPeRo’s sensitivity to real-life issues outside a carefully controlled environment showed that while progress has been made with robot technologies, there is some way to go before they really move on to the ability to perform complex interactive tasks.

One issue with PaPeRo is that, under its plastic shell, and stripped of its bells and whistles, it’s basically a notebook PC with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP operating system, a Pentium M 1.6GHz processor and a 40G-byte hard-disk drive.

While it recognizes that more work needs to be done with PaPeRo, NEC sees a market developing for PaPeRo as an entertainment and education robot in classrooms. Toward this, a number of PaPeRo are being exposed to children in a 6-month experiment in a playpen at the 2005 World Exposition, in Aichi, western Japan, the company said.

Aside from vendor optimism about the future of robots, experts also expect them to play useful roles in, for example, kindergartens, said Emiko Takeishi, senior analyst at NLI Research Institute’s Social Development Research Group.

Sure, but given the performance of robots to date, making then useful partners could prove anything but child’s play.

Paul Kallender, IDG News Service, Tokyo Bureau
IDG News Service 3/24/05