Interest
2nd Pepper Hackathon Transforms Robot into a Barista
posted on by Lynzee Loveridge
SoftBank hosted another "hackathon" for its promising AI robot Pepper at the at Nescafe Harajuku. Three teams had a total of four hours to design a program centering around serving coffee.
The programmers each focused on different aspects of being a good barista. Team A tried to teach Pepper how to create latte art, Team B modded Pepper's personality into a confident, lady-killer waiter, and Team C added different responses based on whether the customer was a regular or a newbie.
Customers at the cafe voted for their favorite and Team B took home a huge haul of coffee-related goods.
SoftBank hosted a previous hackathon event. Etsuko Ichihara and 10 other people modded Pepper for lewd interactions that utilized her touch-screen interface for groping. After a certain amount of interaction, Pepper asks the user to stop, takes their picture, uses facial recognition to determine their age and gender, and then posts that information along with a mosaic of their face on Twitter.
