Building a semi-autonomous sociable robot platform for robust interpersonal telecommunication

Abstract

This thesis presents the design of a software platform for the Huggable project. The Huggable is a new kind of robotic companion being developed at the MIT Media Lab for health care, education, entertainment and social communication applications. This work focuses on the social communication application as it pertains to using a semi-autonomous robotic avatar in a remote environment. The software platform consists of an extensible and robust distributed software system that connects a remote human puppeteer to the Huggable robot via internet. The paper discusses design decisions made in building the software platform and describes the technologies created for the social communication application. An informal trial of the system reveals how the system's puppeteering interface can be improved, and pinpoints where performance enhancements are needed for this particular application.