Modularity and integration in the design of a socially interactive robot

Designing robots that are capable of interacting with humans in real life settings is a challenging task. One key issue is the integration of multiple modalities (e.g., mobility, physical structure, navigation, vision, audition, dialogue, reasoning) into a coherent framework. Taking the AAAI Mobile Robot Challenge (making a robot attend the National conference on Artificial Intelligence) as the experimental context, we are currently addressing hardware, software and computation integration issues involved in designing a robot capable of sophisticated interaction with humans. This paper reports on our design solutions and the current status of the work, along with the potential impacts this design will have on human-robot interaction research.