A brochette of socially interactive robots

Abstract

The design of interactive mobile robots is a multidisciplinary endeavor that profits from putting robots with people and studying their effects and impacts. To do so, two main issues must be addressed: giving robots capabilities in order to interact in meaningful and efficient ways with people, and the ability to move in human settings. This paper briefly describes four robotic platforms that are going to be demonstrated at the AAAI 2005 Robot Competition. Interactive Capabilities for Mobile Robots Spartacus is the robotic platform we have designed for highlevel interaction with people in real life settings. The robot built is shown left in Figure 1 and is equipped with a SICK LMS200 laser range finder, Sony SNC-RZ30N 25X pan-tiltzoom color camera, an array of eight microphones placed in the robot’s body, a touch screen interface, an audio system, one on-board computer and one laptop computer. The robot is also equipped with a business card dispenser, which is part of the robot’s schmoozing strategy. Numerous algorithms must be integrated to provide Spartacus with interactive capabilities. MARIE (Mobile and Autonomous Robot Integrated Environment) is our middleware programming environment allowing multiple applications, operating on one or multiple machines/OS, to work together in order to facilitate program reusability. MARIE currently links Player/Stage/Gazebo (Vaughan, Gerkey, & Howard 2003), CARMEN (Montemerlo, Roy, & Thrun