T-Top, an Open Source Tabletop Robot with Advanced Onboard Audio, Vision and Deep Learning Capabilities

Abstract

In recent years, studies on Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) examine how to improve the quality of life of people living with dementia and older adults (OAs) in general. However, most SARs have somewhat limited perception capabilities or interact using simple pre-programmed responses, providing limited or repetitive interaction modalities. Integrating more advanced perceptual capabilities with deep learning processing would help move beyond such limitations. This paper presents T-Top, a tabletop robot designed with advanced audio and vision processing using deep learning neural networks. T-Top is made available as an open source platform with the goal of providing an experimental SAR platform that can implement richer interaction modalities with OAs.