Hitachi's EMIEW3 is the company's first customer service robot that was built for commercial service. The android was designed to help customers get around retail stores and public facilities. EMIEW3 can switch languages to communicate with tourists, detect when customers need help, and share sales information with other humanoid bots.
The Japanese conglomerate's robot can even get back up after getting knocked down in crowded stores. EMIEW3 stays active thanks for a remote intelligent processing system. It uses data about human movement patterns and network cameras to recognize customers who need help, and then interacts with them, according to Gizmag.
After the android detects humans it uses voice and language processing tech that conducts direction analysis to learn the source of the voice. The machine can then recognize and translate voices even in noisy department stores.
When the customer service robots make a sale or get more help with a customer's question, the Hitachi machines use software to communicate with each other. For example, a sales robot could then transmit a sale to a cashier robot.
EMIEW3 is about three times faster than Pepper, according to Engadget. The latter humanoid robot was developed to read human emotions and has been featured in Softbank mobile phone stores since June 2014. A few drawbacks of EMIEW3 are that it is less friendly than Pepper and lacks a built-in display screen.
Hitachi launched the original EMIEW bot in 2005. Since then the robots have learned to walk at the pace of humans, identify objects, and hear a human voice among background noise.
New upgrades since the EMIW2 version include avoiding objects in blind spots, answering questions, and getting up after being knocked down. In addition, it also slows down when it gets near corners so it does not run into people.
Here's a video of EMIEW2: