Babysitter Robot in Japan
Major Japanese retailer Aeon Co. said on Tuesday, March 25, 2008, it has introduced at a store in the southern city of Fukuoka a robot in charge of entertaining children. If parents want to leave their children with the kid-sized machine, they can arrange for the youngsters to wear special badges that bear codes that the robot can read. The robot can then identify the children by their names and ages and chat with them, even though its vocabulary remains limited.