HRITI - Human Robot Interaction with Translational Intelligence

In today’s manufacturing and supply chain industries, robots play an increasingly prominent role. The presence of robots in the day-to-day life of humans are estimated to increase rapidly in the next couple of decades. Modern-day robots are designed to perform specific tasks and not to connect with humans emotionally. Humanoid robots aim to solve this problem by resembling humans in appearance and body mechanisms. This paper focuses on designing and constructing ”HRITI”, a female humanoid robot capable of generating various facial expressions, voice outputs, and body movements, allowing it to track its environment and perform actions based on it. This is achieved by designing and 3D printing the robot’s body mechanism, coupled with motors and electronic control system consisting of various processing units and actuators. The skin of the robot’s face is made of liquid silicone by using a 3D printed mould and mould press. An 8-bit Atmel microcontroller is programmed with firmware written in embedded C to access sensor data and control the robot’s body movement via AT commands, which can be accessed and controlled by the Raspberry Pi 4 combined with an AI-accelerator hardware such as Google Coral. This will benefit potential artificial intelligence researchers by providing a low-cost, open-source robot hardware platform for research in socio-emotional interactions between humans and machines. The existing robotic faces are not natural and do not show many emotions.