Collaborative Research: CCRI: Grand: Quori 2.0: Uniting, Broadening, and Sustaining a Research Community Around a Modular Social Robot Platform

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Quori 2.0: Uniting, Broadening, and Sustaining a Research Community Around a Modular Social Robot PlatformOne significant challenge for robotics research is the lack of a common robot with which to work. It is often difficult to compare results if researchers are using different types of robots that often have different shapes, sizes, sensors, and capabilities. To address this challenge, fifty humanoid robots (called "Quori") will be built. The Quori robots developed will be distributed to research teams across the United States. These robots will serve as a standardized robot platform to create a robotics community infrastructure to advance scientific robotics research. This effort builds on the success of a previous project that designed, built, and tested ten prototype Quori robots, and awarded them to a small selection of U.S. research teams. The current project incorporates the lessons learned from the prototype Quori development to improve the design of the robot, adapt it to make it easier to manufacture at scale, and distribute it to a broader set of research teams. The project connects students and researchers who use the Quori robots through online collaboration tools, regular events, and opportunities to work together. This will build a community of roboticists across the country that can learn from each others' work, share ideas, and allow for rapid advancement of research in robotics. A focus of this project is to include new teams of diverse robotics researchers and pair them with more experienced robotics community members. This will increase the diversity of researchers involved in robotics and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) research in the United States. This project will accelerate the pace of research progress, especially in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This award builds on a successful previous project that designed, implemented, and deployed a limited number of prototype Quori humanoid robots to HRI research teams across the country. The project will use feedback from this initial prototype deployment to redesign the robots to make them better suited for large-scale manufacturing. The central goal of the project is to establish a common hardware and software platform for HRI research and to build a community of researchers around this robot platform. The efforts are strongly influenced by the PR2 Beta Program at Willow Garage, which built a connected community of researchers around the world using the PR2 robot and the now very popular Robot Operating System (ROS). The development of a common hardware and software platform infrastructure, allows students and researchers to rapidly and easily share results and perform replication studies to advance robotics technology in the country. The robots will be distributed based on an inclusive selection criteria that considers the diversity of university types, locations, career stage of researchers, and other factors. The project will build an inclusive community of students and researchers using Quori 2.0 robots, intentionally focusing on mechanisms to bring in new community members, broadening the diversity of the robotics research community, and ensuring they are supported as use the Quori 2.0 platform.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.