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## Realizing a Concept Home Robot with Communication Capabilities 

In the next few years, wired and wireless net- works will bring exciting new services into our lives and with them a lot of complexity. Managing this will be possible only with a simple, user-friendly interface ready to inter- mediate between the diverse network equipment and the people who use it. In an- ticipation of this need Toshiba has developed the ApriAlpha “Robotic Information Home Appliance.” In addition to its abilities to move and communicate, ApriAlpha is easily programmable. It has been designed to grow in capabilities to become a “life support part- ner” that will ultimately provide assistance with handling household chores and care for the aged. 

The first generation ApriAlpha communi- cates through voice recognition and voice synthesis that allow it to recognize spoken commands and hold conversations. It can also recognize individuals, with the capacity to register up to 100 individual faces through its image recognition technology. 

Among the wide range of data transmission capabilities integrated into ApriAlpha is an IEEE802.11b wireless LAN, along with sup- port for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile phone standard that allows remote supervision and operation of ApriAlpha. ApriAlpha can also control certain networked home applianc- es via a Bluetooth™ compliant home server. 

Movement-related capabilities include the ability to input data of a room layout and programming ApriAlpha to follow a specific route and carry out surveillance patrols. 

As far as Toshiba is concerned, these di- verse capabilities are just the beginning, and future research will extend and refine ApriAl- pha’s versatility. 

## An LCD that Displays and Captures Images 

With its new “input display,” Toshiba Mat- sushita Display Technology Co., Ltd. (TMD) 

has drawn on its leadership in Systems on Glass technology to develop the world’s first TFT LCD that is able to capture images as well as display them. 

The company’s prototype display is a 3.5 inch (8.9 cm) low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) TFT LCD with QVGA (320/240) resolution. Alongside the standard display function, the capabilities of the input display allow it capture and redisplay monochrome images with an input resolution of up to 960 X 240 pixels. The new technology utilizes photo sensors embedded in each pixel of the display. This represents the latest advance in the TMD’s pioneering work in Systems on Glass, namely the ability to form the components of LTPS displays directly on their glass substrate. Image capture is accomplished by placing the image, a document or a photograph, for ex- ample, face-down on the display. 

The input display differs from a camera in that its built-in image sensors record an actual-size image of the original, opening up a wide range of business and personal uses. One application that Toshiba is considering, along with further refinement of the tech- nology, is a fingerprint recognition technology that could be employed in iden- tification systems for e-commerce and other financial transactions. 

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