In Madrid’s Plaza de Carlos Trías Beltrán, on the first floor of number 7, and sharing space with the entrepreneurial ecosystem of The Valley, is what is probably the largest robotics collection in Europe. Consumer robotics that Pablo Medrano, CEO of Casual Robots, has been able to bring together over recent years to make them available to companies, educational centers and direct sales.
It is surprising, as soon as they arrive in space, to see robots like Aibo, developed by Sony in the 90s, or Jibo, the creation of a group of scientists from MIT and that could soon begin to be marketed in Spain to the delight of the most children, or the elderly, thanks to their gifts of empathy and characteristics to help in educational tasks.
Pablo Medrano tells how they receive the robots two years before they hit the market. Most come from the United States and Japan. ” Although today a robot is still a computer with legs” says Medrano , “they will allow us to take an evolutionary leap, since they are a compendium of many technologies”. They are already capable of incorporating empathy and personalization. And they are getting cheaper. Today any robot can do everything your mobile does, and it also incorporates the multimedia system that you may have in your home, or Security, or all the home automation functions.
” Until now, non-industrial robotics has been a real failure , however the conditions exist for this to change, ” says the CEO of Casual Robots. However, it is very daring to say that robots will evolve in a similar way to the human species. Logically, exponential speeds and being connected to the cloud have achieved unimaginable things in a very short time. ” There is talk of 2045, and we will probably arrive earlier, as the point where the computing capacity will be higher than the human intellect itself .”
The maximum exponent in consumer robotics, in recent years, dates from 2014 with the appearance of the humanoid robot Pepper. For around 2000 dollars, the same as a Smart TV, families in Japan could have a human-looking machine, but a bit silly since it is not capable of doing many things. Pablo Medrano points out that “ in consumer robotics, for years and years, we have been with software far above hardware . Now, however, we have all the hardware ready, with enough power, with the cloud, and the software is far behind . “
Artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies that have joined robotics in recent years, enable the emergence of social robotics. And they can work with any of the smart digital voice assistants on the market today, like Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, or Apple’s Siri. “ Social robotics is a brutal new business model. We will even see this type of robot for free in the market, due to the great interest in the services that they will carry behind ”.
Google is the one who is betting more clearly on consumer robotics, with its Android system. Almost all robots that go on the market carry the Google operating system. Also the new Pepper, due out this summer, will be Android. “ Jibo, which has been in development for four years and has an investment of 52 million dollars, is one of the best developed robots that exist. They have been more concerned with the software and the user interface, than with the wow effect of the form factor ”. In Jibo Alexa is implemented in English. It has movement limitations, but for price and capacity for evolution it is a good proposal. Entertainment, security and support are the keys to Jibo. It has 3D cameras and voice interface. And it needs zero learning ”.
Mike, Zenbo, Sanbot, Amy, Promobot, are other robots that Casual Robots has in its window and that are mostly intended for the social and educational environment for the home. All of them integrate the capabilities of communication, multimedia, home security, advanced LIDAR sensors, laser emitters, projector, infrared cameras, voice control, multi-touch screens, … And although there is still a long way to go to make them truly useful, They are here to help us, and to stay.
