Designing a Tabletop SAR as an Advanced HRI Experimentation Platform

Tabletop robot platforms are being designed and used to experiment and develop human-robot interaction modalities. Progress in the field of socially assistive robotics is influenced by the perceptual, reasoning and operational capabilities available on these robots. This paper presents an open-source platform designed to facilitate prototyping advanced interaction capabilities onboard on a tabletop robot. It describes the hardware and software components implemented, along with resource usage and power consumption. It also presents an interaction scenario implemented on the platform to demonstrate its capabilities.