Pepper the robot needs U.S. programmers

Pepper the robot participates in a Japanese ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this year. Its manufacturer, SoftBank Robotics, is opening new offices in San Francisco and releasing a development kit for Android programmers. Japan-based SoftBank Robotics announced Wednesday at Google I/O, the company's annual developer's conference, that it is opening a new Pepper-focused outpost in San Francisco and unveiling an Android SDK, or software development kit, in the hopes of enticing programmers to write code for the robot. "Pepper is ultimately an unfinished product, and we just wanted to incentivize developers to expand the ways in which people can engage with a humanoid robot," says Steve Carlin, vice president of SoftBank Robotics Americas, which has an existing office in Boston. Asked if SoftBank will roll out at SDK for iOS developers, Carlin says he wouldn't rule anything out but "for the moment Android is the pervasive language."