Reprinted from the PEG page of the programming education project promoted by CANVAS.

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On December 27, in collaboration with the Certified NPO Sodateage Net, which supports children and youth, we took on the challenge of programming the humanoid robot SoftBank Robotics Pepper!

For this second installment, we challenged ourselves to get Pepper to recognize faces by integrating with Microsoft Azure’s Face API.
(*Click here for the report on the first session during summer vacation: https://www.sodateage.net/7780/)
The participants were middle school students.
Some of the students returned to participate again after the previous session!
This time, an adult team also joined in on the project.
It was a workshop where both children and adults gave it their all.

In the morning, to review the basics of operating Pepper,
each group used Pepper to introduce themselves.
To synchronize speech and gestures effectively—such as by using the “wait” command—
it’s important to be mindful of things we don’t usually notice when talking to people.

In the afternoon, we finally moved on to programming using the facial recognition API.
Before starting our projects, we heard an interesting talk from Mr. Kazuyuki Takahashi of Forex Robotics Co., Ltd.—a company that actually uses APIs in its product development—about how linking a coffee maker with Pepper allows the system to take “regular” orders from regular customers.

In the workshop, too,
we used conditional branching to change what Pepper says depending on who is standing in front of him.

For example…
At the entrance of a nursing home,
to residents: “Have a safe trip!”
to visitors: “Hello, are you here to visit a resident? Thank you for your hard work.”
To security guards: “Thank you for keeping watch!”
In a restricted area at an amusement park,
to non-authorized visitors: “What are you doing here?”
And so on.
Although the time was short,
rather than just coming up with scenarios,
the participants added touches like intentionally drawing out the endings of Pepper’s sentences to make them sound funny. It was impressive to see how the project was filled with creative ideas designed to make communication between people and robots more enjoyable.

With children and adults working together,
many future scenarios featuring Pepper were created.

*This workshop was conducted as part of the Microsoft × CANVAS “YouthSpark: Programming for All” project, utilizing SoftBank Group Corp.’s Pepper Social Contribution Program.