Award

During Phase I we were able to build a proof-of-concept robot system to validate and demonstrate our approach and underlying technology to design a robot system capable of natural human-robot interactions. Building upon these foundations, we have a solid technical foundation to meet our Phase II goal of developing a robust robot system capable of natural and seamless interaction with a range of persons, both previously known and unknown. The development of such a system will expand the use of robots to increasingly dynamic operations with both known and unknown people. To accomplish this objective, we will 1) develop an integrated robot solution, including robust mobility and sensing hardware, that is capable of interacting with a wide range people, 2) to enable this robot to communicate with a human operator using natural communication modalities including gesture recognition and speech recognition and synthesis, and 3) engage end-users throughout the project to solicit inputs for desired system design and to provide evaluations of the system usability once constructed.