Fujitsu Enon Service Robot, a humanoid design for a store associate or tour guide

[CEATEC 2008] The idea of having robots help us with easy tasks like directions in a museum, retail stores and transporting light charges (10kg) is interesting (and not new in Asia), although you would think that they don’t really need this in Japan: everywhere I go, there are always four people ready to help me at any given time, so the idea of increasing this “manpower” with the help of robots feels a little strange, but I guess that “service” is never good enough in Japan.

The Enon robot has two cameras that can provide it with 3D information (in the same fashion that our own eyes do). With them, it can compute distances and avoid obstacles (even moving ones, like humans). It has a touch display so that its masters can interact with it, and a speaker to communicate verbally (in addition to virtually). I’m under the impression that it is mainly aimed at helping customers, but it can also be setup to patrol places such as data centers (an easier task, when compared to helping humans).

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Robots, Top Stories