Toyota, NTT Team Up on “Partner” Robots

Toyota Motor Corp. and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. plan to jointly research and develop robots designed to help household chores and otherwise aid humans.

The collaboration will team NTT’s Corveo artificial intelligence technology with Toyota’s robotics expertise. The two companies plan to demonstrate a prototype of a so-called partner robot at various technology shows in coming months, starting with next week’s Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies exhibit in Chiba, Japan.

Corevo promises to improve interactions between humans and robots through NTT’s voice recognition, dialogue control and synthetic voice technologies. NTT also is developing a way for robots to recognize hand gestures and other non-verbal communication cues from humans.

Toyota will provide its Human Support Robot (HSR) to the program. The robot is designed to pick up objects from the ground, retrieve objects as needed and communicate with people. In addition to chores, the robots are expected to help parents keep tabs on small children and perform other tasks.