CommU and Sota Social Robot unveiled by a Humanoid

Japan welcomes two now adorable robots created by famous robot father Hiroshi Ishiguro. Meet CommU and Sota in the video below.

The likely first press-conference moderated by a humanoid robot took place today in Japan. CEO of robot company Vstone Ltd., Nobuo Yamato and famous robot professor Hiroshi Ishiguro appeared in a press conference to introduce the new so called sociable robots, ‘CommU’ and ‘Sota’.

The press-conference was hosted by only the robot science communicator Otonaroid and the robot anchor Kodomoroid at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Technology (Miraikan).

The cute CommU and Sota robots have been developed to improve the sense of humanoids for interaction in dialogue. The make people feel more engaged in conversation with them by featuring diverse eye movements and gaze directions. It works as you can see for yourself in the video below. Both robots have personality and expression that makes them lovable.

Robot maker VStone will bring the 28 centimeter tall Sota robots to the market for about $850 this summer. As the robots can communicate with each other you should get at least two as seen in the video above. 

The CommU robot is more sophisticated than Sota and can make eye contact with people while conversing. There are no details on pricing and release for CommU yet.

Via the VStone site (Japanese).