A roadmap to Social Autonomous Robot

Social robot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A social robot is an autonomous robot that interacts and communicates with humans or other autonomous physical agents by following social behaviors and rules attached to its role.

The Navigation Stack is the basis of a mobile robot but a robot that is only able to move is not useful at all. What is missing is a reason for which a robot should move. This reason must be provided by the social attitude of Geduino: its role in society must define not only how to move but its overall behaviour!

The following roadmap for Geduino development was written following this goal: bring Geduino to be an Autonomous Social Robot!

Navigation

Navigation is the basic of an autonomous robot: the ability to move autonomously. This step includes:

• build a map of unknown environment;
• localization;
• plan a path to reach the goal end execute it;
• avoid fixed and mobile obstacles.

In this video you can see a demonstration of the Geduino Navigation Stack.

Perception

Perception is the ability to sense real world by sensors's measurements. Of course perception is already used in Navigation but, in order to interact with humans, it must be extended:

• using computer vision, to detect and recognise objects and humans;
• using speech to text algorithm, to recognise voice.

This step is actually in progress: by now some tests with OpenCV and Geduino camera was performed.

Interaction

Navigation is the fundamental interaction between Geduino and external world. Geduino's interaction capabilities must be extended based on the social role we will assign it. Hardware's extensions must be evaluated in this phase (arms, audio output etc…).