Enhancing My Keepon robot: A simple and low-cost solution for robot platform in Human-Robot Interaction studies

Many robots capable of performing social behaviors have recently been developed for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies. These social robots are applied in various domains such as education, entertainment, medicine, and collaboration. Besides the undisputed advantages, a major difficulty in HRI studies with social robots is that the robot platforms are typically expensive and/or not open-source. It burdens researchers to broaden experiments to a larger scale or apply study results in practice. This paper describes a method to modify My Keepon, a toy version of Keepon robot, to be a programmable platform for HRI studies, especially for robot-assisted therapies. With an Arduino microcontroller board and an open-source Microsoft Visual C# software, users are able to fully control the sounds and motions of My Keepon, and configure the robot to the needs of their research. Peripherals can be added for advanced studies (e.g., mouse, keyboard, buttons, PlayStation2 console, Emotiv neuroheadset, Kinect). Our psychological experiment results show that My Keepon modification is a useful and low-cost platform for several HRI studies.