This project is to design, develop, and freely distribute novel, affordable, modular hardware and accompanying software platforms for enabling non-contact human-robot interaction (HRI) research. Such research is a significant portion of HRI today, and encompasses a broad spectrum of computing challenges and compelling application domains, including education, training, rehabilitation, and health. The goal of this project is to significantly increase access to hardware to a large body of researchers, so that computing advances can be applied to physical systems and evaluated in real-world environments, in order to drive progress in the computing community.
Advances in sensor and communication technologies have facilitated progress in computing research on physical platforms. The field of human-robot interaction in particular has grown significantly and actively brings together an interdisciplinary community of researchers across computing, robotics, and social science. However, progress has been limited by the lack of affordable, general-purpose, modular hardware platforms with available low-level software that would enable large numbers of computing researchers to enter the field and develop and test algorithms, as well as conduct statistically significant user studies by deploying systems in the real world and collecting user data to inform further computational research in HRI.
