Toyota’s Kirobo Mini – a baby robot to be your friend

If you’re lonely and tired driving and crave for a companion who is 10cm tall and is able to fit in your Prius or Corolla cup holder, Toyota has a product for you. This Motor Corporation will sell you its Kirobo Mini robot who talks and keeps you company. It can talk but can’t drive and will be sold for under $400.

The name comes from “kibo” or “hope” and “robot”, and has the mind of five-year-old child.
As Fuminori Kataoka, general manager in charge of this project, said that its value is emotional. Orders start later this year and shipments are planned for next year. For now on there is no plans for overseas sales. The company said that they plan to rollout gradually, being limited to Tokyo and Aichi prefecture, the headquarters in central Japan, in order to get response from consumers.

This robot is equipped with a microphone, a camera and Bluetooth and it connects to smartphones through a special software application. When it hears a voice its head turns towards it, however sometimes that function is not so perfect.

“Toyota has been making cars that have a lot of valuable uses. But this time we’re just pushing emotional value,” Kataoka said. This small robot can’t recognize the face, or different people. But the camera inside the robot enables it to recognize some facial expressions, and with that it attempts to detect emotions. In this way that it can appropriately adapt its manner of moving and speaking.

Kataoka mentioned that many lonely elderly people, young singles as well, live alone in Japan. They all need someone to talk to. In reality the technology can be a helping tool in caring for the elderly or sick people.

“This is not smart enough to be called artificial intelligence,” he said. “This is about the existence of something you can talk to. A stuffed animal might not answer back, but people do talk to it, like my daughter once did this. But if it talked back, wouldn’t that be better? And isn’t this better than talking to a box?”

TMC is aiming at creating vehicles that surpass buyers’ expectations, the ones that the customers see as “irreplaceable companions”. Kirobo Mini is a very much like contact manifestation of the Toyota Heart Project. With this project Toyota clearly established humanlike interplay or communication between machine and man. This plan is different from other cars that are based on the identical concept of “Inspiring the Heart, Inspiring You”.

Toyota hopes that the opportunity of living with Kirobo Mini will enable people to make society more abundant.

Public display was at the IT electronics exhibition “CEATEC” in Japan 2016 “Connecting Society, Creating the Future” at the Makuhari Messe convention centre in Chiba Prefecture from October 4th to October 7th.

Video :