Body Self-Awareness for Social Robots

Just as humans show conscious of their body, social robots, in the way to be truly autonomous, they should also be able to recognize its own configuration. Our research group is working on a project named BertsoBot which aims to develop social minstrel robots for entertainment. The work presented here focuses on the automatic recognition of robot self body postures. Only proprioceptive information is being used and several supervised classifiers are compared to make the approrpiate choice that fulfills the task requirements. A ROS module that performs the online classification has been implemented for endowing the robot with self awareness capabilities. The developed implementation allows our NAO minstrel robot to make decisions based on its body posture and state instead of just relying on a blind finite state automaton. A demo is provided in a link to a video.