So I will give you a short presentation of what we want to do, where we are going to with our robots.
This slide has been presented before, you know, the situation of the growing population, and the ID came from the Japan,
and probably you all know that, so I will skip this slide.
But the Japanese told us that, and they told us, you know, very soon it will arrive in Europe as well, so you have to take care of robotics.
That's why Aldebaran started to develop robots in 2005.
So short presentation of Aldebaran, you know us very well, so I will go really fast.
So our goal is to develop the robots as it has been presented before.
Robots to help people, to assist people, probably to entertain people, but today our first market, you know it very well,
it's academic and research and education, but of course what we want to go to is this robot for everyone.
Our first product is now, you know it very well, and you have to know that we sold more than about 3,000 robots all over the world.
It makes us leader in humanoid robotics.
We are still convinced that legs are nice, and so we keep on doing legs, and it's true that it's very difficult, but it's very funny as well.
And today we are more than 200 people, mainly in Paris, but we have new offices in Shanghai, in Boston, and in Tokyo now.
So we want to be as close as possible as our customers, and I think we are quite appreciative.
I hope you will confirm that, because we try to help you in using robots, because today you are buying robots,
but tomorrow we will buy you your research, your innovation, to have them in all future products.
That's why my presentation will...
Oh, I've lost my... I don't know.
So, because this market is what we are targeting, for instance for elderly people,
we have been meeting elderly people, we went in special houses, and we don't present now.
We say, okay, we are a French company, and we want to develop humanoid robots to assist you,
and the first reactions are, but are you kidding me?
I like my nerves, I don't want a robot, I don't want a machine, what are you talking, are you kidding me, it's not serious.
And then we say, okay, we were wrong, so forget it, sorry, we are leaving.
But before leaving, we show you now.
And then they changed.
Oh, he's very nice, what can he do, can I talk to him, could he listen to me, could he dance for me, and so on.
So, I really appreciate your presentation, because that is the very first thing we can do with now, is to entertain people.
We cannot really be useful with now, because it's so small.
And it cannot be, and as you know, it's not very fast, it doesn't work very fast, it doesn't grasp anything,
so it's not very useful in real life, but it's very entertaining.
But even with a small size, already we have many ideas, so in the CASERA project,
you showed that it's possible to do many services, some first services with the now.
And on the next video, I will show you some other ideas we had.
Some of them you have also, I think.
So, it's in French, but you have subtitles if you don't speak French.
That's something that you pointed out, you want to call the robot when he's not here,
even by pressing the button you mentioned, or by calling him.
If not too far, you can call him, he listens, he can localize where the song comes from, and go there.
So, he's reading on the internet.
This lady is almost blind, so this feature is very useful for her,
because she can't read the paper even on the computer, so it's another way to access the information.
And we can assume that the robot has followed her from the living room to the kitchen,
so it can bring the information everywhere she goes.
So, let's see if we can find her.
Hello.
I want to thank you for your message.
I'm very happy.
So, I would like to ask...
Sure.
When we made this video, it was quite difficult to have this speech recognition working well.
So, the robot, at this moment, recorded the wave file,
only the sound without understanding a single word.
Now, with a new, nuanced speech recognition we have,
we have, we can have a real speech recognition and to write a real email and not sending a wave as a
joint file. Here now is used as a radio but as well as a mobile phone.
And the last thing you'll see that has been said before, the robot can as well be accepted by the children.
And before being bored with their grandmother they can play with the robot.
So of course some of this demonstration are not working perfectly but it gives you a very good vision of what we want to do.
And we are today, as I said, the speech recognition is working much better.
Following the person is something that works. Going at the localization, navigation, we are still working on it.
As since we have seen here in Hamburg. So we all know that the research is going in that direction and this used to be science fiction and now it's only science.
For instance, one of the problems that have been mentioned by you is the problem of the energetic autonomy.
So we are working hard on it because we know that if we want to have an assistant 24 hours a day the robot has to be autonomous.
Here is the first demonstration of an autonomous reloading feature. The robot is looking for this recharging pod that is here.
So with vision it will detect this logo of Aldebaran and go straight to this logo.
And when it comes close enough it will detect these no marks that you are familiar with.
And these no marks are localized very precisely, relatively to the charger that is here.
And then only by vision it will localize itself to have the plug exactly at the good position in its back.
We have changed, I can't cut the sound because for that it's not really useful.
We have changed the connector of the battery to make it accessible easily.
And then only by vision it can have a very accurate positioning in front of the charger, in front or in back of the charger.
We have a system with magnets like you have in the new Macintosh that helps with the connection to be exactly at the good position.
And then the robot can rest waiting for the reloading.
We had discussion with people manufacturing batteries because we said maybe we can ask, wait for you to develop batteries that have 24 hours charge.
And they said no, don't even think about it.
Even if we can have the maximum performance with this kind of battery you will have two, three hours, not more.
So you have to concentrate on reloading the way the robot can unplug itself.
So this is a very important thing and of course this works for long.
It has been working for long with vacuum cleaners and for many other robots but with legs and that's probably another drawback of the legs.
It's not easy to walk on the charger and to have the current going through the legs to the battery.
So that's why we have to find other solutions, very complex solutions as this one.
But we know that that's probably one of the key issues before having the robot useful at home.
But now it's designed for interaction with people, not only with the charger.
And we are working with many labs all over Europe to improve that.
So here I wanted to show you this very impressive demonstration of our partner from the UMAVEPS project.
That's okay.
The Czech Technology University.
And they are able in real time to detect the people if it's a male, female, old, young.
And if he knows the person, he's able to recognize the person.
That works.
Today it doesn't work.
They work on now with a camera of now.
But they are not running this software embedded on the now.
They are still using a remote PC to do that.
But as you can see, it's very, very reliable.
And this is necessary to have the robot interacting with people.
We have been working as well with a software called FastVect and it's a commercial product
that works very well for face recognition and the robot now.
With embedded on the robot, you can have a look on this assembly and detect people.
And if he knows you, he will say your name.
So this technology is working quite good.
The CTU is able to recognize not only people that the robot knows,
but also to detect if it's a male or female or the age of it.
And that's really a research result.
That is not commercially available as far as I know.
And something we are very proud of, and it counts to have a very good interaction with people,
is to have a robot.
If you want to have a social robot, you should be able to detect your feeling.
And in this demonstration of the Limcy, the French university,
only by the prosody, the tone of the voice,
the robot is able to understand the way you feel.
And you can confirm it doesn't speak Italian.
It works in every language. It's just blah blah.
But they have made some tests.
It's more reliable with European languages.
And if you talk with Japanese, for instance, the percentage of recognition is lower.
It's still working, but it's lower.
So it's really funny to see the difference, even in the tone of voice.
It will change from a culture to another.
So it means that the learning has to be adapted for each region of the world.
And because I strongly believe that this robot has to be a service robot anyway,
someday it has to catch objects, to grasp objects, to bring objects to you.
Even for now, of course, it will be only small objects.
But this is a result of a grasp project.
And now we have a stereo vision head.
We have this question about that.
And using the stereo vision head, it's able to localize the object.
And to grasp it.
So this has been done with DFKI, people from Bremen.
The problem we have is that the range of view of the stereo vision system is quite narrow,
and the workspace of now, as you know, is quite small as well.
So it's difficult to find the good position in which the two workspaces
and stereo vision space are overlapping.
But it works, and the robot can adapt its position to have this intersection on the object.
And then we have the other part, how to give the object to the human in a reliable way
to avoid the robot, the object folds.
And for that, we check several things.
The robot checks that the hand is coming close to its own hand.
And that you try to pull the object, and then the robot will detect it,
and then release it in a safe way.
And of course, we are developing the bigger one.
Because you showed, and you say that there is a lot of things that you can do with a small robot as now.
But of course, what we want to do is to go further to assist people for manipulation of objects at home
to bring you a beer, to for instance, down the garbage.
Or another thing that has been required by people, nurses in hospitals, for instance,
is to assist people lifting from a seat position to a standing up position.
Of course, we do not imagine that the robot will carry the person,
because if such a robot will be very dangerous, it is strong enough to carry a person with arms.
So what we want to do is to use it as a mobile furniture.
You know, elderly people often have a lot of objects all around them.
It's for memories, of course, but it also, because they like to have a way to carry themselves on it.
So the robot could be used as a support, mobile support, available everywhere.
So we have this simulation in which we can dimension, a good dimensioning of the actuators
required in Romeo to assist people for these kind of tasks.
So Romeo is still under development.
We had a first demonstration of our first squat of the legs last November.
And now we are integrating the legs in the final exoskeleton, carbon exoskeleton.
And we think that the robot will be available for walking at the beginning of next year.
I really hope to show you a recent walking robot next time we met.
So thank you.
That was my point for today, if you have any questions.
Thank you very much.
Questions, please.
I think you said you sold 5,000 now or so?
3,000, yes.
Whether all to research institutes or other from many customers?
So there are mostly research institutes and some private developers, people at home.
They bought the now.
And it's kind of partnership we have with them.
We ask them to develop application they want to have at home.
So we select these people because of their IDs.
They contact us saying I would like to have a robot at home to do such, to play with it,
to have a robot that helps me to sing, to play.
And if the idea is good and if they are able to develop the application, so they have a good level in software,
we sell robots to them for a reasonable price.
And we have about maybe 250 people like that.
But the other one, 90% of them are academics, teachers, researchers.
Yes?
You said it was difficult to charge the robot through the legs.
I didn't quite get it if you said why.
Yeah, I didn't say that way.
The point is the biggest problem we have with the robotics in general and with now in particular
is to have wires going through the joints.
And if you have also in the joints of now, I hope you never open that.
But if you did, you'll see that we have very flexible boards and no wires
because the wires are fragile if you fold the wire many times it will break.
So having this high current wires going through the joints of the legs is very fragile so we can't do that.
So are you, I mean, which kind of sensors are you getting from the Romeo?
So for the Romeo, we have, for the cognition, we have four cameras, four micro.
And that's it.
So we are, we have been asked to have a 3D sensor like Kinect because Romeo is a little bit bigger, it's reasonable to have.
So we imagine to have a special hat with a Kinect or as a sensor on it or to have four 3D information.
But you will have a stereo vision on two of the cameras.
And will the automatic recharge be available?
Today we have just a prototype and we are not completely happy with it.
So I can say it's probably, do you have any information about that?
No, it's an ongoing work because we have plenty of reliability problems with it.
We have the concept, the concept is okay, but we want to have a product and there is a difference between research and industry.
We cannot be up here with only a principle.
We have to find a reliable solution without any patent.
And so that's, I really, I would say it's not before one or two years.
Yes.
I want to ask you, basically the robot actually is coming to the market empty.
So it is ready to be populated by every software you want.
But there is no source code repository where the software is already available to undertake some action.
So every researcher or every customer buying the robot is receiving the machine which could do, but basically do nothing.
So what is your position? Are you planning to provide new robots already equipped by some software just to make available an open source repository or something like this?
Because it is also one of the factors limiting the widespreading of this technology.
Of course. So maybe Marc could...
There is a platform, as Bob said, there is a platform at the moment that we used only for the developers who wanted to test it.
It was a bit of test with a few individuals that had the robot to handle it.
And this platform enables them to create apps, share code source, share projects and everything.
Is that something we are opening? We just opened it.
And we are just at a test, so maybe in France because it was easier to communicate.
And this is something that we are opening just now for everybody.
So everybody should ask a login, go into this platform and share, well, get the information from all the developers or all the users of the robot.
And share with the community of the now users.
That is something I already existed.
And there is, as well, a platform which its name is now a store.
You can download it or you can...
Some applications are downloadable and some applications will need to pay for them.
I don't think you want to pay for the many moments. It is too early.
So you can download what is for free and put your own application in a sea with other people down there.
Does that answer your question?
And for the academic community, we would like to organize that if a researcher says,
oh, did anyone develop special software, for instance, for grasping objects?
And today we didn't organize the exchange of people, a researcher, using the now.
That is something we have in mind.
And with that, we don't know if it will be the same platform as a now store or if it will be a specialized platform dedicated to research.
There will be a developer on which you can share, a now store on which you can download and buy,
and a research academy allow on which you can grow some projects.
Question. You said that you are working with grasping, you know, grasping.
And what is the idea, I guess, that with now the objects are very small, but I suppose that with Romeo will be bigger.
I don't know, you said that in next year it will be stuff interesting, the working of Romeo.
But I don't know if you have already tested the object grasping with Romeo and grasping objects and more, transporting objects with Romeo.
Not with Romeo, no, no.
We are still developing the hands, so we have a new technology.
We will have the same kind of hands as for now, but with a better adaptation to the grasped objects.
And we have to develop within a European project a more dexterous hand for Romeo.
Speaking of Romeo, can any human robot potentially fall to other kind of physical calculations that it will not like, or are you just hoping that it will not?
We're hoping.
So now we are in the structure of Romeo today, we are trying to have a kind of flexible joints that make the robot able to have a better reaction to falls.
For the head as well, probably the most fragile part of the head, that's what we've seen now in the head, because it falls from very high and it's very fragile.
And so we are redesigning the internal shape of the head to have a way to support shocks.
But yet we haven't dimensioned completely the system to prevent damages when the robot falls.
We could have, based on the experience of Nao, but honestly it would have made the development longer and longer.
So first we want to have first experiments with the real robot as it is, and we'll make it fall and we'll see.
That's the way we did for Nao, you know, for Nao at the very beginning when he felt he broke and more time after time we corrected that and today could fall almost 3000 times before breaking.
Oh, sorry.
An important element these days is always about the middleware and we see these things on the Nao or on the PR2, people are developing under Ross, what will people develop under Romeo?
Romeo will have the same environment as Nao, and with Nao there is a bridge between Ross and Nao Key.
I don't know how comfortable you are with that, but today that's our position, we provide bridges to Ross and that's our position.
Same question I have.
Thank you very much.