Fable: Socially Interactive Modular Robot

Abstract

Modular robots have a significant potential as user-reconfigurable robotic playware, but often lack sufficient sensing for social interaction.We address this issue with the Fable modular robotic system by exploring the use of smart sensor modules that has a better ability to sense the behavior of the user.In this paper we describe the development of a smart sensor module which includes a 3D depth camera, and a server-side software architecture featuring user tracking, posture detection and a near-real-time facial recognition.Further, we describe how the Fable system with the smart sensor module has been tested in educational and playful contexts and present experiments to document its functional performance.