Pepper

As robotics technology advances, there is a lot to wonder about their role in our lives and our perception of them. As a software engineering intern at Chick-fil-A, I got the chance to work with a Pepper semi-humanoid robot, built by Softbank Robotics. This little guy is packed with a variety of sensors and built-in voice and face recognition software.

As advertised by its makers:

Pepper is the world’s first social humanoid robot able to recognize faces and basic human emotions. Pepper was optimized for human interaction and is able to engage with people through conversation and his touch screen.

And it was my job to put that to the test and explore how Pepper could be used to enhance the restaurant experience at Chick-fil-A. The touch screen on Pepper was an asset that led to a variety of use cases we tested, like promoting the Chick-fil-A One mobile app, helping with questions about the menu, and even ordering food. I wrote several Python scripts for dialogs and situations that took voice or the touchscreen data as input, and we demo-ed some of the applications around the office. There were some limitations of the technology, of course, like the accuracy and speed of face/people recognition or movement capabilities. Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to further advancements in the technology and more applications of it.