A robot that becomes a personal trainer and scolds you if you make a mistake in a fitness exercise: researchers from Milan and Turin Polytechnics present Pepper
A robot that counts squat repetitions, verifies the correct body position and scolds its fitness student if he makes a mistake. Pepper is the robotic personal trainer developed by students of the Polytechnics of Milan and Turin as part of the multidisciplinary project “AI empowered hardware for fitness applications”.
Everything started from the basic version of Pepper, the robot of the Japanese company SoftBank Robotics realized in 2014 and designed to understand human emotions and tones. Young researchers from the universities, working as part of the Pioneer entrepreneurship program of the School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (SEI) in Turin in collaboration with Reply, developed an artificial intelligence algorithm that can monitor a person’s fitness activity, combined with dedicated hardware that allows the robot to interact with those who work out, and even correct them.
Pepper: how the robot trainer works
Pepper is a humanoid robot that can be programmed to understand and react to human emotions, as well as to communicate with those around it thanks to its ability to analyze tone of voice, expression and gestures. This robot costs between €17,000 and €20,000 and from the basic version can be programmed to perform a variety of tasks.
As part of the “AI empowered hardware for fitness applications” project, researchers from the Milan and Turin polytechnics have used artificial intelligence to turn Pepper into a robotic personal trainer. The robot is thus able to count the repetitions of an exercise, as well as understand thanks to the AI algorithm if the trainer takes a wrong posture, and correct it. In order to achieve the result, in addition to scientists, the human experience of personal trainers and experts in motor sciences has been essential.
Robot and everyday life: a question of cost
To be able to use a reprogrammed robot for other tasks like Pepper represents the entry of robotics into our everyday life. If integration has not yet taken place, it does not depend so much on the mistrust that humans have towards machines, but rather on the costs necessary to create robots with specific tasks.
A robot for fitness is therefore an investment for gyms, which could guarantee an excellent service even in times of distancing problems, as now happens with the restrictions for Covid-19. In order to get robots into the mainstream, however, we must also focus on encouraging affordability: an AI-powered robot like Pepper could be integrated into a much smaller, portable device, so that it would be easier to purchase and market.