NEC and their pet robot project, PaPeRo, has certainly come up with a fair number of iterations to date, but somehow or rather, it has never made it past the commercialization stage. I guess all of that is about to change now as NEC’s household communication robot PaPeRo, might take that route next year – a good half a decade after this particular research and development project kicked off.
LIXIL Housing Institute, an organization that has rented the robot from NEC since 2009 in order to develop a new HEMS (Home Energy Management System) managed to introduced their very own fair share of improvements such as 12 new functions including the ability to open windows depending on the kind of weather you’re experiencing, while monitoring the home’s energy usage and making the relevant adjustments to increase efficiency.
Not only that, the PaPeRo will be able to use indoor and outdoor temperature sensors alongside a wind sensor so that the ideal settings for heating and air conditioning can be set. A little bit of Siri can be seen here, as you control home appliances via PaPeRo using natural spoken language – I would presume only the Japanese language is supported at the moment though.