Personal robot: Towards developing a complete humanoid robot assistant using the Internet of Things

Abstract

Over the past few decades, the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) has become increasingly popular in the research community for its promise to homogenize the heterogeneous pool of devices having sensing and actuation capability, which are increasingly getting internet ready. On the other side, the need for a social companion to the human kind in form of a humanoid robot, which is acceptable to the society is another long-standing challenge waiting to be solved in a technically feasible and creative manner. So, in the present research, we have tried to address this challenge by creating a personal assistant out of the NAO robot by enabling it to perform the various tasks that its owner would require of it in a way customized to each of its owners. In this process, we have proposed a novel architecture through the IoT paradigm by using a demand-pool based brokerage system for actuation on the robot through the internet and an asynchronous polling based I/O system to trigger various events on the robot as per the owner's requirements. The results and performance of the robot through this framework have been discussed and future guidelines have been provided to make this software more feature-rich and learning oriented.