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

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The application of social robots is increasing daily due to their various capabilities. In real settings, social robots have been successfully deployed in multiple domains, such as health, education, and the service industry. However, it is crucial to identify the strengths and limitations of a social robot before it can be employed in a real-life scenario. In this study, we explore and examine the capabilities of a humanoid robot, ‘Pepper’, which can be programmed to interact with humans. The present paper investigates five capabilities of Pepper: mapping and navigation, speech, hearing, object detection, and face detection. We attempt to study each of these capabilities in-depth with the help of experiments conducted in the laboratory. It has been identified that Pepper’s sound and speech recognition capabilities yielded satisfactory results, even with various accents. On the other hand, Pepper’s built-in SLAM navigation is unreliable, making it difficult to reach destinations accurately due to generated maps. Moreover, its object and face detection capabilities delivered inconsistent outcomes. This shows that Pepper has potential for improvement in its current capabilities. However, previous studies showed that with the integration of artificial intelligence techniques, a social robot’s capabilities can be enhanced significantly. In the future, we will focus on such integration in the Pepper robot, and the present study’s exploration will help to establish a baseline comprehension of the in-built artificial intelligence of Pepper. The findings of the present paper provide insights to researchers and practitioners planning to use the Pepper robot in their future work.