Software Development for the Pepper Robot
Pepper is one of the first humanoid robots on the market that is capable of identifying the principal human emotions: joy, anger and surprise. It is able to scan nonverbal language, such as the angle of a person’s head.
Pepper is a very friendly robot that reaches out to communicate with humans
But one of Pepper’s main advantages is the potential to use custom software development to adjust its behavior, AI, movements and many of the robot’s other exciting features according to your business needs. This makes Pepper unique and interesting to us as a custom software development company that is looking for new opportunities and niches to attract new clients.
We’re talking to Slava Dubovitsky, who is a certified Pepper developer at Diatom Enterprises – a company located in Latvia.
– Is Pepper the first humanoid robot available for purchase and custom software development?
– No. But Pepper has many advantages and surprising features that were only available in some custom-made robots created at American and Japanese universities. Now we have all these features on the table and we can develop custom software for it.
– Okay, you develop software for Pepper. What programming language do you use for Pepper?
– We use Python.
– How many certified developers are there in your company who can develop software for Pepper? Where did you get these certifications?
– We were trained in France and at this moment, we have four engineers here in Riga who are certified developers for the Pepper robot. But, what’s interesting is that developing software for Pepper is not that hard, and we already understood that it would take a week to train a new developer to help us. Right now, we’re all busy with interesting development tasks.
– What kind of software can you develop for Pepper? What are the most interesting and promising things you see for it?
– We can develop presentations, training, and learning apps for Pepper. Actually, this is a huge topic and we are going to do a presentation about it in the near future.
– Okay, interesting. But let’s put it another way. I need a simple application for a waiting line in a hospital. The difference is that Pepper will talk to visitors, say “hi,” and call the next number. What is the development time for the simplest application with very friendly emotions, including greetings and advice to push a button on the Android tablet that we have with the Pepper robot?
– About a week of work. It’s quite simple. But in the future, you’ll be able to adjust the application more and more. There are many different kinds of features we could add to this application.
So, we’re looking forward to your presentation and wish you good luck with Pepper.