Artificial intelligence has taken a lot of our lives. There are smart cities, smart homes, smart work. All of which should help us improve, at least in theory, our lifestyle. Now Nao has also arrived, a robot produced by SoftBank Robotics and developed by Enea researchers, which has been scheduled to help around the house and advise us on how to save energy and reduce bills, communicating with sensors and appliances and warning us of any faults.
“It's a machine that can talk to machines very well, but it can also talk to people and interfaces with the inhabitants of the house. Thanks to AI (Artificial Intelligence), it is able to recognize a series of objects, such as glasses. We could ask him to find them for us, for example. Unlike the others, it is a sensor that can go around the house and be very useful. If we forget a pot on the fire, it is able to recognize a danger and even come looking for us to warn us”, he explained Andrea Zanela, researcher at the Enea robotics and artificial intelligence laboratory.
Nao is 60 centimeters tall, weighs 5 kilos and has 25 degrees of freedom. What the robot interacts with is an intelligent home, with interactive appliances and sensors scattered throughout the home, which allow it to monitor the rooms and communicate any malfunctions in the electrical or thermal systems or water and gas leaks: Some indications you can give me are, for example, how many times I open the window because perhaps I consume a lot, too much, for the heating. Or it can warn me that I left the light on, or the TV, and I can turn it off remotely. The goal is to create awareness to educate to behave in an energetically more virtuous way at home. In two years of experimentation we have calculated that a family saves an average of 8%. Which in euros does little, but it's a first step,” he said Stefano Pizzuti, engineer responsible for the Smart cities and communities laboratory of Enea.
Nao's is a sensitive intelligence. Enea researchers have identified a wide range of applications, such ascare for children with autism spectrum disorders: “We noticed that the children were very fascinated by Nao, an intuitive and very immediate contact. So we did research, pspoke with neuropsychiatrists and psychotherapists, and discovered that the robot could be very useful because autistic children are very often frightened by people's facial expressions, they almost never hold their gaze. And they are very attracted to technology. We are developing a project to include Nao in a therapeutic protocol, the goal is to act as a go-between, to encourage dialogue so that children communicate not only with the robot, but also with other people. Or assisting the little ones in their daily activities, interacting with them”.
Nao was awarded as one of the best eco-innovations among "The genes of Ecomondo 2019” the largest Italian fair on the green economy, which is held every year in Rimini and which this year has reached its 23rd edition.
“New technologies, and Robotics and Artificial Intelligence are certainly at the top of these, can really improve people's living conditions. We must be able to address with great skill and attention the change that is taking place and that will profoundly transform our living environments, aiming to create innovations that are certainly more sustainable, but also more inclusive; because everyone, even those who are more fragile, must be able to experience an improvement in their quality of life” declared Andrea Zanelato, researcher at the Enea robotics and artificial intelligence laboratory.
