Willy Wonka Pepper Robot Seeks a Pet

Willy Wonka Pepper, a cute, smiling robot, had been helping human in the field of health care. Now, the robot’s team has stepped up to improve its interaction skills. For the past few months, Pepper experimented with a new co-communication method, in which Pepper says a word to itself when it is confused.

The robot used the co-communication method to ask a new machine questions and, if the machine does not know the answer, the robot tells it what the question was about and, when necessary, the two talk about the issue to either confirm or disagree. The co-communication method is an improvement over usual ways Pepper can interact with human, such as saying simple sentences like “Hello” or even “What is it?,” according to the research paper. By adopting the co-communication method, the robot can get answers to questions more quickly.

Existing co-communication training techniques teach machines to think like people — talk and see, but we found that doing things like ‘see’ or ‘hear’ are really hard for machines to learn. So human needed to teach machines to communicate the same way people do.

Therefore, Pepper uses touch sensors on its forehead, through which it can mimic human gestures.

In 2019, researchers tested the robot’s abilities in caring for people in healthcare environments. The year before, human had successfully tested a similar robot with young children. In 2020, another group tested a robot with veterans in nursing homes, who wrote an open-source software solution that allowed Pepper to teach humans how to respond to a robot.

It seems crazy that we're just starting to understand how humans can interact with machines. While the human and robotic forms of communication might seem distinct, humans and robots use a lot of the same strategies. If you want to understand the human-robot relationship, you'll need to learn what AI actually want — and sometimes it will come down to not talking to the human, which is challenging.”