Design for a Robotic Companion

We can learn from the history of robotics that robots are getting closer to humans, both in the physical as well as in the social sense. The development line of robotics is marked with the triad: industrial — assistive — social robots, that leads from human–robot separation toward human–robot interaction. A social robot is a robot able to act autonomously and to interact with humans using social cues. A social robot that can assist a human for a longer period of time is called a robotic companion. This paper is devoted to the design and control issues of such a robotic companion, with reference to the robot FLASH designed at the Wroclaw University of Technology within the European project LIREC, and currently developed by the authors. Two HRI experiments with FLASH demonstrate the human attitude toward FLASH. A trial testing of the robot's emotional system is described.