Aisoy Robotics: Spanish robotic innovation with emotional technology for the education sector

With the motto 'Social robotics for all', Aisoy Robotics, a spanish startup, has developed the first robot capable of showing emotions and empathy with its interlocutors: Aisoy1, that lays the foundations of the so-called 'Internet of emotional things'.

Innovative robotic technology developed in Spain is what the startup offers Aisoy Robotics, based in Alicante, who has developed a robot, named Aisoy1, showing emotions and making decisions, with a relationship of knowledge and affection with its users. To achieve, This company has had the support of the Everis Foundation, through your technological broker i-deals, after winning the Entrepreneurs Award 2013 organized by this institution and be part of its dissemination through the Tech Workshop Series presentations.

After five years of research, Aisoy Robotics has been perfecting a pioneering robotic technology that has its main focus of action in the educational environment., although its use has also been considered in children with autism or brain damage, and even for residential home automation environments.

Its development is part of a small team of professionals (engineers, mathematicians,…) who almost six years ago decided to materialize a dream in a company: develop intelligent and emotional robots under the maxim “that use natural language, were easy to use and low cost; whose first version we present in 2010 with the prototype of the emotional engine”, explains Diego García, Senior Telecommunications engineer and one of the founders of the company.

Since then, its founders have worked with Aidia, a visual programming tool that is your development platform), and for developers (Airos 1 SDK y Python) until reaching the current version of Aisoy1, based on Raspberry Py and in ROS of Willow Garage (Robotics Operating Systems), “which has allowed us to integrate a very powerful and economical card, Linux based, with a very strong community of developers to offer the interoperability of the robot with different platforms”, explains Garcia.

Thanks to it, This version has allowed them to sell more than three hundred units of the robot in just two months, Regarding the first limited edition, of two hundred units, which were sold in two years, "besides, We have distributor reserves to sell them in the United States, Canada and France, markets with great interest and highly developed in robotics”.

Education as a focus of action

Although the initial design of Aisoy1 was “initially focused as an intelligent companion 'toy' - says Diego García -, which had six small servos, with touch sensors, accelerometer, camera and movement in mouth, eyebrows and neck tilt and rotation, with an RGB in the 'heart' and LEDs in the mouth, “The new versions are enhanced as an educational and creative tool”.

In this sense, Aisoy1 integrates an emotion monitor (happiness, sadness, dislike, fear, reproach, remorse, esperanza,…) and learn from your environment, which allows it to offer the most appropriate responses to each person, since the user can program their relationship with simple and intuitive interfaces, “In addition to the fact that on the web we evaluate the applications that users make and integrate them so that the rest can add them, promoting collaboration between robots in the Aisoy community”.

In addition to being a highly attractive educational tool for learning programming, with the development of robotic applications or Botapps, Aisoy1 is used in educational applications for training in, For example, trigonometry. “We have thirty institutes in Alicante working with the robot, and one of them has even performed a play in which two Aisoy1 participate, promoting creativity and uniting culture and technology”.

Internet of emotional things

One of the new features of the latest version of Aisoy1 is that robots can interconnect in 'the cloud', so that all the information they collect throughout their useful life, as well as the programs that their owners upload to them, is made available to all other robots. This way, Collective intelligence is generated among all robots. Aisoy Robotics' robots are not only connected to the Internet of Things; They are also the first step towards the “Internet of Affective Things”.

Those responsible for Aisoy Robotics are already working on a new version “in which we want to simplify the interaction as much as possible., making it much more fluid, with elements that interact with each other, either with household objects or other robots, that is to say, collaborative robotics. Besides, We also want to evolve its design and offer more robot mobility, something that was demanded of us from the beginning, although at that time we focused more on the interaction and the emotional motor to avoid a complex design”.