Navel - a social robot with verbal and nonverbal communication skills

Navel - a social robot with verbal and nonverbal communication skills Claude Toussaint, Philipp T Schwarz, Markus Petermann CHI 2023: The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Session: Interactivity 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. Web:: Video teasers for papers at CHI 2023