Adapted Pepper

Abstract

One of the main issue in robotics is the lack of embedded computational power. Recently, state of the art algorithms providing a better understanding of the surroundings (Object detection, skeleton tracking, etc.) are requiring more and more computational power. The lack of embedded computational power is more significant in mass-produced robots because of the difficulties to follow the increasing computational requirements of state of the art algorithms. The integration of an additional GPU allows to overcome this lack of embedded computational power. We introduce in this paper a prototype of Pepper with an embedded GPU, but also with an additional 3D camera on the head of the robot and plugged to the late GPU. This prototype, called Adapted Pepper, was built for the European project called MuMMER (MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot) in order to embed algorithms like OpenPose, YOLO or to process sensors information and, in all cases, avoid network dependency for deported computation.

An Exploration of the Pepper Robot’s Capabilities: Unveiling Its Potential

“…It has also been reported that Pepper's camera suffers from radial distortion, especially with flat surfaces [32]. Another study [38] added a 3D camera to enhance the capability of Pepper. Tariq et al [39] found that AI algorithms misclassified faces when analyzing South Asian participants, which supports the current study's results related to Pepper's inability to identify Asian participants' faces.…”

Improving Visual Perception of a Social Robot for Controlled and In-the-wild Human-robot Interaction

“…Existing approaches to enhance Pepper's visual perception connected the robot's input and output functions with other visual perception libraries, such as the Robot Operating System. However, existing work has not integrated SOTA online human tracking and pose estimation, limiting its visual perception performance in complex scenarios [3,7].…”