LILI Version2: A Low-Cost Robot that Tells Interactive Stories and Recognizes Objects

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that autistic children tend to speak and interact more with an interactive robot. Unfortunately, due to the high deployment cost, many robotic experiments were still conducted in highly controlled clinical or home settings. Hence, a low cost robot needs to be designed to benefit families with autistic children. In Summer 2014, we have designed a low cost robot, LILI version 1 with limited features e.g. hard coded commands. Since then, we have added improved features to LILI such as adding a natural language processing engine so that LILI can understand more human-like commands. In this paper, we describe two more new features we add to LILI, namely (i) interactive story telling, and (ii) object recognition. We present how we design these two features. We also briefly describe how we re-design the software architecture to make it more modular.