Trust is key to service robot design

Designers of service robots must marry advanced technologies such as natural language processing, facial recognition, and a humanoid form factor with an understanding of psychology for human-machine interaction. SoftBank Robotics Group Corp.’s Pepper, which is being used in retail, educational, and hospitality settings, is an example of the thought around trust that goes into building and using such robots.

Building Pepper with purpose

“Since Pepper is primarily customer-facing, its form factor has a lot of affordances for people,” Willis said. “We include speaking, waving, and other nonverbal gestures.”

“When somebody walks into a store and sees the robot, it grabs their attention,” he added. “People are curious and looking to be entertained, and our responsibility is to convey its purpose and build trust.”

SoftBank Robotics, formerly Aldebaran, makes the humanoid Pepper, Nao, and Romeo robots, as well as the Whiz floor-cleaning robot using BrainOS technology for autonomous navigation.

Working to exceed expectations

“We chose not to make Pepper too human-like,” Willis explained. “Pepper is often the face of social robots, and it has an attractive, non-threatening design.”

“People are more willing to accept occasional failures in voice recognition, based on the design,” he added. “Such robot form factors encourage you to trust and help the robot.”

While SoftBank Robotics has not announced any future humanoid designs, it is working on other improvements, which are pushed out to users via a Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) model.

“Pepper’s capabilities are always improving, including internal hardware and services,” said Willis. “As we demonstrated at CES, we’re also integrating with other cloud services to deliver more front-end experiences and value to store associates and consumers.”