FUJISOFT PALRO

DESCRIPTION

FUJISOFT PALRO is an Educational-Robots from FUJISOFT. It is built for Companionship, Entertainment, Monitoring. Key figures: 1.8 kg, 22 degrees of freedom, price ¥670,000, released 2010.

PALRO is a 40 cm bipedal robot whose job is conversation. FUJISOFT has sold it since 2010, which makes it one of the longest-running humanoids anywhere, and its main customers are Japanese elderly-care homes: it recognises residents by face and name, remembers what they told it, runs group exercise and quiz sessions from the front of the room, and reports back to staff. The current generation, model PRTF061-W13, weighs about 1.8 kg in ABS, acrylic and aluminium alloy, with 18 cm shoulders, 16 cm arms and 18 cm legs. Twenty-two axes drive it — two in the head, eight in the arms, two at the waist and ten in the legs — so it walks, stands up and gestures rather than rolling. It draws about 30 W talking and up to 60 W walking from a 4,900 mAh lithium-ion pack. For interaction there are four microphones with a noise-suppression board and a mono speaker, a 2 MP camera at 55 by 43 degrees, a touch sensor, eight pressure sensors, two ultrasonic sensors and three-axis accelerometer and gyroscope. Sixty white LEDs plus colour LEDs in the head, chest and back carry expression. It runs Ubuntu Linux, connects over 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0, and does its speech recognition in the cloud. The business package for elderly-welfare facilities is listed at 670,000 yen before tax (737,000 yen including tax).

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