Childcare robot

NEC developed a childcare robot PaPeRo which is capable of recognizing and verbally communicating with people, sending images by mobile phone, playing games ans singing along with others.

Some salient features are face recognition. It uses stereoscopic vision made possible by the two cameras in its eyes, to know the distance between it and others and it adjusts this distance. Once it recognizes the face, it calls the person by name. Other feature is that it uses voice recognition and synthesizing technologies and it can converse with people. It has 8 microphones and a noise canceller to improve and stabilize its voice recognition in noisy environment. One more feature is touch sensors, PaPeRo has 9 touch sensors (4 on head and 5 on body), one of the coolest feature is that PaPero has a built-in mobile phone. When parents call, PaPeRo locates the child and start playing with him/her. Parents can watch their kids playing and even talk to the kids.
PaPeRo detects objects using ultrasonic sensors so it moves without running into things. It uses its camera for measuring the movable path range.

It comes with PaPe sack which if worn by kids, makes PaPeRo accurate in understanding where the kid is and better understand what kid is saying.
PaPeRo can listen to the several people at the same time.

With all these cool features who won't want to own one.