Robotics Engineering Group Project
This project tries to improve these social soft skills of Sota, an interactive robot designed for multiple applications focused on personal assistant. It has a human-friendly look, with funny humanoids eyes, so it is a perfect subject for starting a human-robot interaction. Our goal is to improve the communication with a face tracking process combined with an as natural as possible movement of Sota’s head, in order to give to the user the feeling of a social interaction and so help the engagement between them. We started our work defining a use case to identify, clarify and organize our project requirements. The original scenario that we thought for the interaction between Sota and a user can be described as follows: when the user enters inside the room, Sota starts searching for his face with a predefined motion of the head. Then, when the user is found, Sota turns his eyes’ color to blue, to notify that the process is started, and it waves hello. After that it starts tracking the users face until he is in the room. When the user exits from the room Sota stops the tracking process and makes its eyes blinking in red. This scenario has some necessary preconditions: we assume that only one person at a time can be inside the room and that we have another external system who recognizes when the user enters and exits from the room.
Ravi Aggadi, Francesca Canale, Francesca Cantoni, Filippo Gandolfi and Marco Giordano