Along with hundreds of new students heading to university this week, there are three newbies ready to help at the book UBC Vancouver book store.
Grey, Kelly and Robson – a trio of Kiwibot robots – are new robotic ambassadors helping to get students ready for the new school term in a first-of-its-kind technology pilot project, according to a news release from the University of British Columbia Wednesday (Sept. 3).
The robotic ambassadors rolled out Tuesday, and will be deployed on campus for four weeks at the book store. Kelly is answering student questions, while Grey and Robson are handing out treats to welcome students.
If students want to ask one of the robots a question, they can just push a button on the robot's lid and speak to it. The university says the robots' abilities and tasks will evolve as they learn more over time.
They navigate using sensors that detect movement and obstacles, while cameras capture and analyze human interactions. However, the release adds the robots don't "see" in the traditional sense and the images do not contain any recognizable human features. They're also not recorded.
The AI robots are made by Kiwibot, a robotics company based in San Francisco, Calif. They are roughly the size of a minifridge.
The robots are powered through the Rogers 5G testbed, said Raymond Chau, the program manager for Rogers UBC Collaborative Research and Innovation Partnership.
"The goal is to study how students interact with the robots, and build a dataset on human-robot interaction, emotion recognition and real-time AI learning for possible future and industry collaborations," Chau said.
“In a way the robots are also students because in the weeks leading up to the deployment, they needed to be ‘educated’ about UBC so they can perform their function."
The university said it took about two weeks to get Grey, Kelly and Robson up to speed on the UBC Bookstore.