PaPeRo: A Robotic Connection Between You And Your In-Car GPS

by Justin

Always a country to innovate and try something new, Japan is working on putting a robot between you and your car navigation system. More specifically, Japan-based NEC Corp. demonstrated PaPeRo, a human machine interface, at AT International 2008 and PaPeRo just happens to be that robotic go-between. PaPeRo is a home robot used as a human interface machine that happens to understand you when you tell it, for example, you’re looking to head to Tokyo. The robot can recogize your voice and upload the spoken info to its server via a home network. Once uploaded to the server, the robot crunches the bit and bytes mathematically taking into consideration your previous conversations.

From this the robot can supposedly determine the best route from your current location to Tokyo, transmitting that information to your in-car navigation system. In fact once you hop in your car you’ll find PaPeRo right on your navigator’s screen confirming the transmission of its instructions have been transmitted to the vehicle. Pretty wild, eh? We think plain ol’ voice recognition built in to the GPS unit performing the same function is just a whole lot simpler though!

via techon