During November 6-9th 2013 was iREX, the International Robotics Exhibition. The exhibition is a major worldwide event that happens every 2 years. It is THE place to be for all robotics companies that want to get noticed on the Japanese market, and many experts are scouting here for the latest trends for their business or their concurrence.
Of course, Nao was there, and I spent most of the time representing Aldebaran Robotics at our stand with our Sales Team.
This year, there were much less humanoids, and very few interactive robots. So many people could see how unique Nao is.
While one Nao would attract eye balls and cameras with a trendy dance, we were letting people play simple games, or take Nao by the hand for a walk.
A lot of press and TVs came by, and for once I was happy that they wanted to show the interaction with the robot, and not just the dance. So Tokyo TV showed their reporter taking the robot by the hand, and playing the Guess Sport game during their morning show, for example.
Some funny things happened during the show, when people met Nao. Some people get frustrated when Nao doesn't understand more than its list of applications (we are working on that!).
I am glad we had some really nice moments: an 80+ year old man in a wheel chair took Nao by the hand for a walk, with his wife pushing the chair. Far from being afraid of robots, the elderly Japanese people see it as the future of nursing care, with robots working alongside nurses.
And the opposite, we had a young child (about 8 years old?), who stayed for hours at our stand to play with Nao. I showed him pretty much every applications we had, he played all the games (Animal Card Game, Guess Sport,…), saw many dances, took Nao by the hand… Until finally it was closing time and his mother told him it was time to go. Even when Nao was sitting and resting, the child would stare at it and wait.
Atsushi Tanizaki (Sales Director for Japan) and I gave a bilingual En-JP conference on Human-Robot Interaction With Nao.
I believe Safety, Autonomy and Interaction are the 3 fundamental areas that Robotics need to work on to put robots in everybody's homes.
During the talk, we focused on how we work on making Nao more and more interactive.We talked about the progress we've made, and our goals for creating a natural interaction and conversation between Nao and the user.