Australia's Commonwealth Bank leads research on social robots

One of the biggest opportunities to revolutionise technological design is developing social robots that can work alongside humans.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia innovation solutions manager Will Judge told last week's Xerocon South conference the bank's innovation lab is in the early days of experimenting on Chip, a 100 kilogramme, 1.7-metre tall humanoid service robot bought by the bank for $A300,000 last month from Spanish robotics company PAL Robotics.

Multilingual Chip, one of only three worldwide, is being used by researchers in human-robot interaction and navigation of environments.

Conference organiser, accounting software company Xero [NZX: XRO], says it is developing a number of smart services by using machine learning and artificial intelligence to delve into the $1 trillion in transactions it handled in the past year.

Mr Judge heads the Sydney-based innovation lab of Commonwealth Bank, which is Australia's largest company and owner of ASB Bank in New Zealand.

He is leading a two-year deal with Australian shopping centre and retirement village owner Stockland and five universities in the Australian Technology Network of Universities, including the social robotics research lab at Sydney's University of Technology, to jointly run a range of robotics experiments.

Mr Judge says artificial intelligence and machine learning is already prevalent in society when people are choosing their favourite music on Spotify or talking to friends on Facebook. That trend for robots to do tasks only humans could previously do is shifting beyond the big technology giants into the wider corporate world, particularly in healthcare management and financial services.

"There's a shift occurring to design technology that not only meets customer needs but is also socially intelligent," he says. "We're more connected than ever before with access to vast amounts of data that connect to each other regardless of time and distance but it can feel dehumanising."

Research conducted by the partners will look at opportunities and limitations in human-robot interaction – what the robot is best doing and what humans are still needed for along with the commercial applications of social robotics across a number of industries.

Part of the project is researching how humans feel when being greeted and dealt with by a robot while others will focus on getting Chip to respond appropriately and in a natural way in different situations.

"It's harder said than done," Mr Judge says. "Humans have a range of facial gestures and verbal and non-verbal communications and when they first meet someone they process a lot about them." 

For both the bank and Stockland, Chip could lead to socially-engaging robots greeting customers entering a bank branch or shopping centre although Mr Judge says that isn't part of the bank's strategy at this stage. The partnership is focused on Stockland but could also be eventually opened to other partners.

CommBank's innovation lab, which it has replicated in Hong Kong and New Zealand, is also working on projects related to smart cities and the Internet of Things. One example of a technology it has developed since opening the Sydney lab two years ago is a beacon system app under pilot at Westfield shopping centres. It sends an alert to customer smartphones about special offers as they pass certain shops they may be interested in.

Mr Judge says there's still a question whether people want socially intelligent robots, particularly due to concern about the potential loss of jobs for humans replaced by them.

The robot Pepper, developed by Softbank Robotics, can already identify key emotions such as sadness, joy, and anger. Japan's Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi has trialled a robot bank teller, NAO, that is equipped with multiple sensors and responds to customer requests with pre-recorded responses.

Hackers at the Disrupt SF Hackathon in the US this week released PepperPay, a robot-wielding machine vision technology that can replace supermarket cashiers by taking photos and instantly recognising any item held up by a customer and then completing the purchase checkout.

Another hacker team released Pepper the Inflight Service Bot, a robot flight attendant that can deal with travellers' needs while in the air along with checking in passengers at the gate and scanning their tickets.

(BusinessDesk)

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