Navel - a social robot with verbal and nonverbal communication skills

Abstract

As robots are used not only in factories but increasingly in everyday life, interaction with them must be as intuitive as possible for everyone. We present Navel, a mobile social robot that supports nonverbal interaction in addition to verbal communication. Thus, the interaction with our novel hardware-software-system is similar to human-to-human communication and appears natural and intuitive for everyone. For social signal perception, multiple computer vision algorithms run in near real-time on an NVIDIA edge device in the robot, achieving low latency and maintaining privacy. For the representation of social signals, an innovative combination of displays and fiber-optic plates is used, allowing the creation of expressive three-dimensional eyes for building realistic eye contact. A lean high-performance software architecture is used to generate agile, lively and context-sensitive behavior. An abstracted humanoid design avoids the Uncanny Valley.