IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018 - 47

a range of the robot's capabilities and functionalities as well as
potential limitations and improvements.
As NAO and Pepper have the same development environment and similar upper-body kinematics, we can transfer a
program or a module from one robot to the other. Because
NAO is already being widely used in the scientific community, a yet bigger B2A ecosystem will be possible by incorporating Pepper for similar research purposes.
All such collaborative efforts not only show the exciting
application and software improvement potential of the Pepper
robot but also help to advance it at the hardware level. For
example, there have been iterative enhancements of the hip
actuator, tablet performance, integrated microphones, and so
forth. With all of these, in a closed loop of interaction among
different stakeholders including academics, research organizations, industry, and end users, Pepper is evolving and finding widespread applications in everyday life.
Mass Adaptation, Awareness, Ecosystem,
and Policy Making
Affordability can be achieved through societal awareness and
subsequent mass adoption of Pepper. This will require the
creation of new and relevant applications for such sociable
humanoid robots. Toward this end, Softbank Robotics is
involved in facilitating a larger ecosystem of business partners, developers, and stakeholders through different programs. For example, the Partner Program (https://www.ald
.softbankrobotics.com/en/partners/partners-program), aims
to support companies in designing and selling business solutions using SoftBank Robotics machines. In addition, SoftBank Robotics hosts events like Pepper World and Pepper
Partner, in which business partners talk about and exhibit
various application and use cases with the robot.
Two areas are equally crucial to pursue: 1) creating a
general awareness and a bridge among industry, academics, research organizations, end users, and policy makers
and 2) advancing the state of the art at the intersection of
robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things
(IoT), and societal needs. To fully realize the positive
potential of social robots, it is strategically important to
bring these two areas into the mainstream agenda of policy
makers and researchers.
In this regard, some ongoing efforts in Europe are significant, e.g., a public-private partnership between euRobotics
Association Internationale sans but Lucratif (https://www.eurobotics.net/), an international nonprofit association for
stakeholders in European robotics, and the European Commission, through the mechanism of SPARC (http://www
.sparc-robotics.net/). As one of the largest civilian-funded
robotics innovation programs in the world, this partnership
aims to shape the future of robotics in Europe by developing
recommendations to the European Commission within the
area of robotics under Horizon 2020. One way to provide the
input needed to connect different stakeholders and positively
influence policy making is through involvement in the partnership's various topic groups (https://www.eu-robotics.net/

eurobotics/topic-groups-/index.html), such as Socially Intelligent
Robots and Societal Applications; Natural Interaction with
Social Robots; AI and Cognition in Robotics; Standardization, Benchmarking, and Competitions; and Ethical-LegalSocio-Economic Issues, to name a few.
In addition, the SoftBank Robotics developer program
(https://developer.softbankrobotics.com) aims to connect
with developers, support their work on the robot, and create a
B2D ecosystem. Programming and app development events,
such as Hackathon 2018 (https://www.ald.softbankrobotics
.com/en/hackathon2018), which has the theme "Pepper for
Well-Being," help involve and generate awareness among yet
other sorts of stakeholders, e.g., experts in user experience
and marketing. The teams explore and create inspiring and
practicable applications using Pepper. Such efforts also try to
incorporate new technologies relating to areas such
as the IoT and Android
Approximately 2,000 robots
tablets and to explore avenues for societal applicahave been provided to
tions of the robot.

educational institutions

Future Prospects and
Grand Challenges
in Japan to support
The development of Pepper was a great learning
the teaching of robot
experience. Ongoing iterative improvements of the
programming.
robot are taking into account feedback from users
and the scientific community and widening its scope to integrate with new technologies. Pepper is the first of its kind to
create an avenue for a new generation of personal and service
robots that are also mass-produced.
However, to achieve future success for such generalpurpose sociable robots, there is still a long way to go.
Such machines must behave in a socially accepted and
expected manner. Taken all together, their need for robust
perception in real environments, the constraints of perceiving and acting in real time with available resources,
and the necessity to dynamically interact with different
kinds of real users pose key challenges for developing a
coherent scientific and functional framework, which still
requires deep investigation from various angles. In this
regard, some directions to explore include connectivity,
learning, cloud-based collective intelligence to develop the
robots' social intelligence and proactive behavior [11], [17]
and understanding human-robot engagement [22].
Another need is to provide users with natural and intuitive
ways to teach the robot new behaviors, making it more individually useful, personalizable, and adaptable for different
domains [18]. Some of the social, legal, and ethical concerns
in the future might involve privacy versus an owner's commands versus social accountability and ethics [12], for which
the involvement of a larger multidisciplinary community is
much needed. With everyone's combined efforts, however,
september 2018

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

http://eu-robotics.net/eurobotics/topic-groups-/index.html https://developer.softbankrobotics.com https://www.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/hackathon2018 http://ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/partners/partners-program http://eu-robotics.net/ http://www.sparc-robotics.net/ http://eu-robotics.net/eurobotics/topic-groups-/index.html

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018