Social Robot

<Describe the selection of the social robot you intend to use. The description includes the reasons for this selection and the characteristics of this specific robot..>

For this task we have chosen Miro, the robot dog. While it is a dog, it has been shown that people have greatly enjoyed conversing with it through regular speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quVza0CED5o . Dogs are also a great companion that can provide warmth to their patient.

We went over the robots with the following ideas:

Pepper is autonomous/can move around and has a tablet
Nao can dance, can do general motions as they have arms and legs.
Navel has expressions (uncanny valley?)
Miro is a dog that can talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quVza0CED5o

Some of us felt like Navel was too uncanny to feel comforting, leaving it out. Pepper and Nao were both valid options, however we deemed that Miro would be the most comforting option out of the 4 available. While Miro is not able to move around, we plan to have a personal robot for each room/person, invalidating the need for complex navigation.

According to their research paper (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tony-Prescott/publication/325788257_MiRo_An_Animal-like_Companion_Robot_with_a_Biomimetic_Brain-based_Control_System/links/5b23c635aca272277fb22a5d/MiRo-An-Animal-like-Companion-Robot-with-a-Biomimetic-Brain-based-Control-System.pdf), Miro has the following features:

- Fully programmable

- Clearly a robot, yet has an animal-like appearance (dog).

- Moveable parts: nodding+rotating head, moveable hearing ears, blinking eyes, wagging tail

- Responds to touch

- Layered control architecture: Fast and slow layers. 

- Can "operate with bespoke control systems"

- Has built-in exploration and obstacle-detection -> However, as per the paper, it does not have built-in navigation, it simply moves to noise.

- Considering the video, it has text-to-speech

Extra personal notes:

The robots can dance
All provide voice synthesis
They cannot pick stuff up

According to their research paper (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254029603_Humanoid_robot_NAO_Review_of_control_and_motion_exploration), Nao has the following features:

- Clearly a robot, yet looks like a human.

- It can even move like a human, with movable limbs.

- Features text-to-speech, sound localization, obstacle detection.

- 640x480 30FPS video.

- Can walk around

- Can communicate with remote computers

According to their research paper (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326334563_A_Mass-Produced_Sociable_Humanoid_Robot_Pepper_The_First_Machine_of_Its_Kind), Pepper has the following features:

- Clearly a robot, yet looks like a human, though does not move arond as human like as Nao. Does feature human like gestures.

- 12h battery life, can move around autonomously

- Features a tablet

- 640x480 30FPS video.

- Uses modules to create a dialogue-based interaction system. (NAOqi), but can be programmed with Python, C++, Java