Experiences during the NAO European Tour (I)
"I think what it was really great about the NAO European Tour was that every city had it's own different charisma and their own personality", tells sales manager Andrea Mestre of Aldebaran, and continue: "We really had to adapt ourselves when we were introducing the robot and doing the presentation, because each auditory was different.
"In my case, when we did a lot of the kinect, then we really could identified with the public because in some cases they found it very charming that you can interact with the robot. But some times it works and sometimes that it didn't. When it worked the funny extense was that everybody just laughed like crazy, but in another kind of auditories they really didn't think that it was so attractive, because they would be much more attracted to the human robot interaction demonstrations where NAO was grabbing one pencil. It was quite interesting to see how people are different, what kind of subjects are of their interest, and what kind of different demonstrations we can do to catch their attention.
"We are a small company, with 150 employees, and us that are working as a sales manager, we are only three people. We traveled with an engineer, that could back us up, and respond the technical questions we got. We were only two persons travelling around Europe when we did the NAO European Tour. We were carrying NAO, T14, the other robots, the Kinect, the megatronics kit, so we were travelling with a lot of stuff. Ex., only the bag with NAO weight 20 kilos, so it was pretty exciting and also thrilling to be walking around with big bag and very heavy stuff", explains Andrea Mestre.
To be continued...
[image source: Aldebaran Robotics]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]
We really had to adapt ourselves when we were introducing the robot and doing the presentation, because each auditory was different.