Nadine humanoid social robotics platform

Abstract

Developing a social robot architecture is very difficult as there are countless possibilities and scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the design of a generic social robotics architecture deployed in Nadine social robot, that can be customized to handle any scenario or application, and allows her to express human-like emotions, personality, behaviors, dialog. Our design comprises of three layers, namely, perception, processing and interaction layer and allows modularity (add/remove sub-modules), task or environment based customizations (for example, change in knowledge database, gestures, emotions). We noticed that it is difficult to do a precise state of the art for robots as each of them might be developed for different tasks, different work environment. The robots could have different hardware that also makes comparison challenging. In this paper, we compare Nadine social robot with state of art robots on the basis of social robot characteristics such as speech recognition and synthesis, gaze, face, object recognition, affective system, dialog interaction capabilities, memory.