A PeRo robot nanny is the latest in a series of robots for the home; NEC and telecommunications giant NTT came together to offer this one to a nation's children.
(Childcare robot PaPeRo) PaPeRo has a built-in mobile phone; parents can call it and order the 'bot to find the kids and play with them. Parents can also talk to children directly or with text messages via PaPeRo. "PaPeRo" is short for Partner-type Personal Robot; it uses a camera in each eye to navigate and has image recognition capabilities to track and identify individual children. The robot has a top speed of 20 centimeters per second, which designers (who apparently don't have toddlers themselves) believe is sufficient to keep up with children. Child-care robot specifications are certainly improving, but we are not yet up to the level of science-fictional robot care-givers. Philip K. Dick wrote about a robot named Nanny in a 1952 short story with the same name.
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