Adapted Pepper
This addresses the computational bottleneck for robotics applications, particularly in mass-produced robots, though it is incremental as it modifies an existing platform.
The paper tackles the lack of embedded computational power in mass-produced robots like Pepper by integrating an additional GPU and a 3D camera, resulting in a prototype called Adapted Pepper that enables on-board processing of algorithms like OpenPose and YOLO without network dependency.
One of the main issue in robotics is the lack of embedded computational power. Recently, state of the art algorithms providing a better understanding of the surroundings (Object detection, skeleton tracking, etc.) are requiring more and more computational power. The lack of embedded computational power is more significant in mass-produced robots because of the difficulties to follow the increasing computational requirements of state of the art algorithms. The integration of an additional GPU allows to overcome this lack of embedded computational power. We introduce in this paper a prototype of Pepper with an embedded GPU, but also with an additional 3D camera on the head of the robot and plugged to the late GPU. This prototype, called Adapted Pepper, was built for the European project called MuMMER (MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot) in order to embed algorithms like OpenPose, YOLO or to process sensors information and, in all cases, avoid network dependency for deported computation.