A Social Robot with Conversational Capabilities for Visitor Reception: Design and Framework

This paper presents a social robotic platform in-tended for usage as a reception agent in a university. This platform makes use of the recent advances in social robotics and conversational systems and tackles the challenge of engaging in conversations without ápriori information about the utterances it will reply to. A detailed design of an animatronics robotics head is shown. The head is actuated by mechanisms for the eyes, the jaws and the neck, to animate the platform during its interactions. The software design, architecture and framework of operation of this platform are explained.