Huggable Robot

The robot is designed to function both as a fully autonomous robot as well as a semi-autonomous robot avatar. In the semi-autonomous case, the Huggable robot is remotely controlled by a human operator. 

In the head of the robot is a variety of microphones, two cameras in the eyes, and a speaker in the mouth. In the body, the robot features an inertial measurement unit based upon passive potentiometers in the hips and ankles for joint angle position detection, an embedded PC with wireless networking.

The robot features a high number of somatic sensors (electric field, temperature, and force) over the entire surface of the robot, underneath a soft silicone skin and fur fabric covering. 

The Huggable consists of a series of body regions – the arms, the legs, the head, and body. The body contains an embedded PC, somatic processing sensory circuit boards, batteries, and motor driver circuit boards.

The neck and shoulder mechanisms allow for active touch behaviors such as orienting towards touch, nuzzling, and hugging. The eyebrow and ear mechanisms are used for expression of internal state. Additional degrees of freedom may be added in the future such as body posture or other facial degrees of freedom.

Expressivity

The Huggable platform has twelve degrees of freedoms (DOFs) to perform animate and expressive motions: three for the head, two for each shoulder, one for each elbow, one for the waist, one for the muzzle and one for each ear. The head can rotate, nod and tilt. The arms can rotate and lift at the shoulders and can bend at the elbows. The ears and the waist can move forward and backward. The muzzle moves up and down when the robot talks.

Huggable is capable of manual look-at and point-at behaviors. Given an x, y coordinate command over wireless communication, the robot is able to look at or point at a specific location.  

Computation

Huggable uses an Android smart phone for its computation power. The smartphone is equipped with internal sensors, a microphone, camera, and an accelerometer. The wireless communication feature of the phone is usefed for connecting the stream of data from the internal sensors of the phone to a monitoring device or a teleoperation interface.

Sensors

The robot is equipped with twelve capacitive touch sensors around its body parts (front head, back head, right ear, left ear, left arm inside, left arm outside, right arm inside, right arm outside, right  side, left side, left leg and right left) and two pressure sensors on its paws. The capacitive sensors provide Boolean on/off outputs and the pressure sensors outputs an analog signal between to indicate how strongly a child is holding the robot’s paws. The haptic sensor data are communicated via IOIO board to the Android smart phone to be used for the robot to intelligently reaction the touch or to be the displayed for the remote operator controlling the robot from distance.