Cynthia Breazeal is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Director of Personal Robots at the MIT Media Lab. There, with her students, she focuses on the development of the principles, techniques, and technologies of personal robots, and conducts research that advances the state of the art in intelligent social robots that interact with humans to promote social and intellectual benefits.
Cynthia and her group also investigate the impact of long-term, personalized human-robot interaction on quality of life, health, creativity, communication, and educational goals.
And it is there, in the group of Personal Robots of the MIT Media Lab where Jibo, the first social robot for the home, was born. Designed to be integrated into people’s daily lives, Jibo explores the world and reacts through expressive responses and movements. In addition, it has advanced Natural Language Processing (NLU) that, together with voice technology and facial recognition, allows you to remember and build relationships with the people with whom you interact the most.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona we had the opportunity to see him, interact with him, and talk with Sergio Marco, Director of Innovation at Everis, who told us about the alliance between his company and NTT Data with Jibo for the development of the application. “BE A MAKER”. The app, based on the open-source Scratch platform, will allow children to program real interactions with the Jibo robot.
The new application will facilitate the learning of programming for boys and girls through fun activities with the support and accompaniment of Jibo, enhancing the development of their creative skills and computational thinking.
According to Sergio Marco, “Jibo is a social robot that seeks to empathize, generate a more personal connection, and is designed to be one more member of the family. It is like a pet, but with much greater intelligence and proactivity. As a social robot, and with its characteristic of proactivity, Jibo will not only attend to our requests, but will also anticipate and know what our tastes and customs are ”.
At the moment Jibo is only marketed in the United States and Canada, at a price of 899 dollars, about 726 euros at the exchange. Although Sergio told us in Barcelona that this year it will arrive in Spain, among other European countries. And he will do it not only to be able to develop his activity and intelligent and emotional capacities in the educational field, but also in the Health field to be able to help in hospitals and at home with the elderly.
As Cynthia herself points out, “robotics will improve our lives. And for the contribution of social robots to our lives to be truly meaningful, they must support the human experience. Studies show that when social robots are incorporated into learning processes, children are more motivated to learn and have a much more satisfying experience ”.
The consulting firm Strategy Analytics seems to be in the same line of what the MIT professor asserts, and in a recent report on robotics it has concluded that future robots will provide much greater value to their users through capabilities to perform unpredictable physical tasks, their ability to learn and their potential to carry out tasks beyond the home. And in this development, social robots, which the consulting firm calls ‘Destkop Robots’, will play an essential role.
