IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018 - 46

(a)

(b)

Figure 4. Use cases of the Pepper robot in (a) public and (b) home environments.

for addressing societal needs, for which the exploration of different use cases (also through various collaborations) is under
way. A few of those are outlined in the following.

(a)

(b)

Figure 5. The application of the Pepper robot in (a) elder care
and (b) child education.

robot should lose control, so it would not crash into a person
or its surroundings. To achieve this, a hardware-level security
feature, employing a brake system and elastomer in the hip,
and a software-level precaution that stops the robot in a stable
position in safe mode are implemented.
Application Potential and Acceptance
Figures 4 and 5 illustrate some of the use cases of the Pepper
robot. The platform, by design, supports creating and running various apps, which can be developed for a large number
of domains, e.g., health care, education, entertainment, and
business. About 10,000 Peppers have already been sold, mainly in Japan. Some 3,000 of them are serving in various B2B
applications: Pepper welcomes customers in SoftBank shops,
sushi bars, clothing stores, and Nespresso boutiques. Roughly
7,000 of the robots are with consumers who want to experience life with a robot. In Europe, successful Pepper trials have
been performed in French railway stations, at Carrefour
supermarkets, at health-care and elder-care facilities, and on
Costa Cruise ships. The robot is also available and used by
academics and business partners in Europe. In the United
States, Pepper can be found, for instance, in San Francisco's
Westfield mall.
Because knowledge about robots will become increasingly
necessary in school systems, approximately 2,000 robots have
been provided to educational institutions in Japan to support
the teaching of robot programming. One of SoftBank Robotics's ambitions is the involvement of Pepper-like social robots
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september 2018

User-Centeredness and Research
Community Involvement
Considering end users' and other stakeholders' feedback is
important for discovering the immediate scientific and R&D
challenges to be solved for the greater societal impact of Pepper-like social robots and their accompanying technology. A
huge database is evolving based on end user and business
partner feedback from B2C and B2B deployments. In addition, expert feedback from other stakeholders, including academics and researchers in various collaborative projects, has
been collected.
For example, in two European Union (EU) projects-
the MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot (http://
mummer-project.eu) and the Culture Aware Robots and
Environmental Sensor Systems for Elderly Support (http://
caressesrobot.org/en/)-the Pepper robot serves, respectively, as the basic platform for the use cases in a shopping
mall (as the part of the codesign process) and in senior care
and assisted-living facilities. Two other EU Horizon 2020
projects, safe robot navigation in dense crowds (CROWDBOT) and advancing intuitive human-machine interaction
with human-like social capabilities for education in schools
(ANIMATAS) (http://www.animatas.eu), will be further
exploring the social navigation and guiding aspects of
autonomous robots, including Pepper, and the educational
potential of socially interactive agents-in-the-loop, also
including the Pepper robot.
Through projects like these, the robot, its capabilities, and
its use potential can be iteratively improved. Such involvement by the scientific community is also elevating the state of
the art, e.g., navigation capability [14], the robot's interaction
ability in public places [15], cultural awareness for HRI [16],
and narrative-memory-based human-robot companionship
[19]. As mentioned earlier, Pepper has also become a standard platform for the SSPL of the RoboCup@Home (http://
www.robocupathome.org) competition, in which various
teams from all around the world investigate and demonstrate
http://www.mummer-project.eu http://www.mummer-project.eu http://caressesrobot.org/en/ http://caressesrobot.org/en/ http://www.animatas.eu http://www.robocupathome.org
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018

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