The nine robots were seated and posed upright along with some of the people who helped make them at a podium in a Geneva conference center for what the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union billed as the world’s first news conference featuring humanoid social robots.
Organizers said the event at the AI for Good Global Summit was meant to showcase the capabilities, but also the limitations, of robotics and how those technologies could help the U.N.’s sustainable development goals. The summit was meant to showcase “human-machine collaboration,” and some of the robots are capable of producing preprogrammed responses, according to their documentation.