RUBI: A Robotic Platform for Real-time Social Interaction

The majority of our waking hours are spent engaging in social interactions. Some of these interactions occur at the level of long-term strategic planning while others take place at faster time scales, such as in conversations or card games. The ability to perceive subtle gestural, postural, and facial cues, in addition to verbal language, in real-time is a critical component of social interaction. An understanding of the underlying perceptual primitives that support this kind of real-time social cognition is key to understanding social development. This paper presents a humanoid robot designed for research on real-time social interaction between robots and humans. We discuss many aspects of the current system including motor control, face tracking, and speech recognition and how it is utilized for human to robot social interaction. We also describe plans to increase the system’s capabilities and communication skills. Last, we describe planned research for the study of real-time social interactions.