This baby-sitting robot can sing and dance
Thursday, March 17th, 2005The following is a translation of an article from the Asahi News
NEC announced on the 16th that they have invented “Child Care Robot PaPeRo,†with improved functions to play with and watch over children. It has the ability to help caregivers in places such as kindergartens and nursery schools. It will be exhibited at EXPO 2005 Aichi Japan.
15-inch tall PaPeRo can understand and converse with hundreds of simple words, and also has been equipped with singing and dancing functions. The surface of the body has been made from a touch sensor, so when children touch PaPeRo it will act happy and make noise. A video phone function has also been included so a distant guardian can call PaPeRo and using its eyes check on their child.
During the exposition, PaPeRo can be viewed in the “Robot Interaction Room,†in “Robot Station.â€
March 20th, 2005 at 9:19 am
Now when I leave Baby Brendan Ichiro with a sitter I won’t need to worry that he’s being raised by someone else- I’ll only need to worry about our PaPeRo turning evil and recruiting him to the evil robot cause. Or the batteries running out. Now this is the kind of innovation I was hoping for when I had a child! Bring me the lifestyle of the future, hooray!
March 20th, 2005 at 2:09 pm
Just like babies raised by wolves grow up to wild feral children, wouldn’t a baby raised by a robot grow up to be more like a robot? Sounds like it could be an interesting, though completely immoral, experiment.
Robots like these are being designed to help Japan deal with an aging and soon to be shrinking population which will create a lack of caregivers. They have similar robots that are supposed to watch over the elderly.