Toshiba presented an attendant robot ‘ApriAlpha V3’ for elderly people in Toshiba’s 130th anniversary exhibition. ‘ApriAlpha V3’ can perceive and identify sounds from every direction by using 6 mikes built inside. It also employs TOSHIBA’s exclusive ‘Voice Signal Processing’, so the robot can respond to greeting of a person and answer a question of another person right away. Its visual sensor and high speed image processing help to identify color and textures of the clothes that people wear. If he meets a person wearing particular clothes that he already has information, he starts to follow him and stops when he reaches the person. When he misses the person, he examines the information again.

Seems to be more of something that keeps people company than actually a robot that serves any particular task. Nothing wrong with that though, because everyone needs attention every once in a while, but I highly doubt this replaces the need for human interaction. You can’t expect for the elderly to be with hanging out with a machine for the end of their lives.

And with its bugeyes the robot does seem fairly creepy.

– via Newlaunches