A robot childcare in stores

The group of large retailers Aeon and the Japanese company Tmsuk, Japanese robotics firm, today presented a companion robot designed to monitor, entertain and amuse children in a shopping mall while their parents do their shopping. The mobile robot measuring 1m40 is equipped with a camera as a right eye and a projector in the left eye to disseminate promotional images on walls in the mall. The views collected by the robot through its eye camera are also displayed on screens located in the shopping mall. To interact with the robot, children must obtain before a membership card of the “Club” of the mall where he officiates in the city of Fukuoka. Thus, through this individual badge, the robot is able to identify each child reading a bar code in two dimensions inscribed on each card. It may as well call everyone by his first name, take account of her sex and age to maintain a small conversation, but with a vocabulary still very limited. Looking ahead, the company Tmsuk and Aeon imagine several types of applications already tested separately, as guidance to customers on the shelves or even the possibility of remotely via the Internet movements of a robot in spans of a supermarket to fill a trolley and thus its courses online. Another objective of this initiative is also accustom children to rub this type to be artificial, the Japanese are convinced that in future they will live daily with robots.