Robots on the march

[Karamjit]

Sitting eating a hot dog outside Lyon's exhibition centre, I couldn't help noticing the group at the next table. Three young men were chatting while a fourth sat completely immobile, not saying a word.

Maybe that was because the fourth was a robot.

Nobody batted an eyelid, as other people came and took a screwdriver to the humanoid device, but then this was Innorobo, Europe's largest robotics event, and here you get a flavour of a future where robots live amongst us.

To anyone who's roamed the vast halls of tech events like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas or Barcelona's Mobile World Congress this will seem a tiny, almost parochial, event.

You can walk from one end of Innorobo to the other in five minutes - but in that time you will see more innovation packed into a small space than you will ever find in those gigantic shows.

The show's focus has in the past been on industrial robotics, and there are plenty of advances on this front.

I spotted a robotic arm delicately picking up individual chocolates and placing them in a box, air-quality robots that can wander a factory reporting back on pollution levels, and cupboards on castors picking a route through a crowd to deliver tools to workers at the other end of the hall.

But the star of the show was undoubtedly Pepper, the most advanced domestic robot to go on sale to the general public. When this French-made humanoid robot companion was offered to Japanese consumers last month for quite a hefty price, it sold out within a minute.

Meeting Pepper, I was not quite sure why. He or she - it seems you decide the gender - does not undertake any practical tasks, but is designed to engage with you on an emotional level. "Pepper won't do the dishes" explains Magali Cubier of Aldebaran Robotics, "but if Pepper can see you are sad, then Pepper will propose a game to cheer you up."

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[dMog]

robotics ha some very interesting things to consider for the future...and some of them are quite scary