Humanoid robots were out of fashion at this year’s RoboBusiness, the annual exhibition in San Jose, California, that pegs itself as “the most important robotics event in the world”.

Make your robot look and sound too much like C3P0, explained Ty Jaegerson of Savioke, and people’s “expectations of intelligence go up”. (Savioke’s robot, a hotel bot that delivers room service in hotels, instead resembles a slightly sleeker R2D2).

The exception to the non-anthropomorphic, however, was the iPal, a child-size robot designed to take on distinctly adult responsibilities.

The 3ft tall iPal has wide eyes, working fingers, pastel trimming, and a touchscreen tablet on its chest. It can sing, dance, and play rock paper scissors. It can talk with children, answer questions like “Why is the sun hot?”, and provide surveillance/video chat for absent parents.

“It’s a robot for children,” said Avatar Mind founder Jiping Wang. “It’s mainly for companionship.” The iPal, he boasted, could keep children aged three to eight occupied for “a couple of hours” without adult supervision. It is perfect for the time when children arrive home from school a few hours before their parents get off work, he said.

The iPal takes the debate over the automation of human jobs to the next level. The ethics of how robots should interact with children is necessarily more fraught than the ethics of robots in the workforce. Childcare has rarely, if ever, been a particularly well-remunerated or respected job, but it is essential.

If children are raised by robots – even just for “a couple of hours” a day – what are the consequences?

Noel Sharkey, a professor emeritus of robotics and artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, has been raising concerns about robotic nannies since 2008.

The iPal. Photograph: Julia Carrie Wong/The Guardian

“Robots are a great educational tool for children. It inspires them to learn about science and engineering,” Sharkey told the Guardian in March. “But there are significant dangers in having robots mind our children. They do not have the sensitivity or understanding needed for childcare.”

The overreliance on robots to look after children will lead to “a number of severe attachment disorders that could reap havoc in our society,” he argued.

In 2010, Sharkey and other robotics specialists published an “ethical appraisal” of robotic childcare that he believed had “closed down the field for now”.

When I contacted Sharkey and informed him about the iPal, he responded, “This is awful.”

Madeline Duva, an adviser to AvatarMind, contradicted Wang’s claim that the robot could be used to mind children for several hours without adult supervision.

“It cannot replace a babysitter, but it is a social robot,” she said. ‘It’s not like you’re going to abandon your kid.”

When I asked her about the dangers involved with creating a robot that could be used in place of a human caretaker, she said, “That’s a good question. We don’t have an answer to that. A lot of parents hand an iPad to kids to keep them quiet. This is more interactive.”

The iPal is already in production in China, Wang said, and will be available to consumers by the end of the year. He hopes to start selling in the United States next year.

The robot has been tested in China, he said, where most of the children can’t get enough of it.



Wang said that “80% love it, 15% have no reaction, 5% are scared.”

Of course, not all of the innovations on display at RoboBusiness are quite so alarming.

The Obi, for example, combines a special plate with a motorized arm to help people with disabilities feed themselves. The inventor’s grandfather was a “very proud, strong man” who suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, said Jim Norman, who was showing the machine off. He chafed at having to have someone feed him, so his grandson, Jon Dekar, got to work inventing the Obi. The Obi does not replace a caretaker – someone still needs to cook the meal and dish it out – but it does allow its user more independence.