Pepper could have a few more grams on his ribs, but is otherwise quite a handsome robot. What the agile nerd from the laboratory of the Faculty of Industrial Engineering at Hochschule Niederrhein (HSNR) lacks in body weight, he makes up for in artificial intelligence. In the Hanseanum retirement home in Krefeld, residents can see for themselves how charmingly the white gnome with the big black googly eyes engages in conversation in the facility's garden room.
"Pepper, do you have a girlfriend?" asks Marianne Knepper, for example. "My family, that's the developers around Professor Kleutges at The Hochschule Niederrhein," Pepper answers the Hanseanum resident in a friendly computerised voice. The 86-year-old Krefeld resident and everyone else in the room applaud and continue to pester the humanoid machine with further questions: How do you see the future? Can people call you by your first name? What do you think of Carlos as a boss?
Carlos Benites is actually something like the head programmer of the lively automaton at Pepper's appearance at the Hanseanum today. The 29-year-old is in his 10th semester of industrial engineering at The Hochschule Niederrhein under Professor Dr Markus Kleutges. The Pepper project is the Mönchengladbach native with Peruvian roots' ticket to his Bachelor's degree, so to speak. With his topic "Development of an LLM-based dialogue program with real-time data for the humanoid robot Pepper with the help of retrieval augmented generation", the Hanseanum visit is the practical test for his thesis.
LLM is a technology language model comparable to ChatGPT. "AI is an important topic today," the student emphasises at the beginning of his presentation. Carlos is the smart entertainer in the Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, in which his professor is the band leader at the back of the room and sets the beat. "Several students have already completed their Bachelor of Science through our Technical Systems, Computer Science and Mathematics for Industrial Engineers project," says Professor Dr Markus Kleutges, proud of how the innovative approach is promoting young academics.
The open-minded Hanseanum makes a significant contribution to ensuring that university theory is carried over into practical application and inspires the seniors: Everyone is enthusiastic about the interactive companion, which has been popular since its first appearance at Neusser Strasse 6 almost two years ago. As Pepper said earlier when asked about the future: "We are using our technology to develop new ways of living together. That's a challenge with a lot of potential."
