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 important challenge for robotics research is the lack of a common robotics platform. Researchers use robots with different shapes, sizes, sensors, and capabilities. This makes it hard to compare results. To address this challenge, this project will build fifty humanoid robots (called "Quori"). Selected research teams across the United States will receive one of these robots and shared software for building a shared infrastructure. This will create a standardized community robotics infrastructure. The researchers who use the Quori robots will connect through online collaboration tools. They will also attend events and trainings for researchers to work together. This will create a community of roboticists who can learn from each other and share ideas. The expected result is the rapid advancement of U.S. robotics research. The project will include new teams of robotics researchers from diverse institutions. Researchers experienced with Quori will mentor the new team members selected. The goal is to grow and diversify robotics and STEM research. This project will speed up the pace of research in robotics and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).A goal of this project is to create a common hardware/software platform for HRI research. Another goal is to build a community of researchers around this platform. This approach was inspired by similar prior research using another robotic platform and the now very popular Robot Operating System (ROS). This project uses lessons learned from the development of ten Quori prototype robots. A small selection of U.S. research teams received these ten Quori robots to use and test. One aim of this work is to improve the design of the robot by enhancing the software drivers. A second aim is to improve the robot's perception, expression, and mobility algorithms. These changes will make it easier to manufacture Quori robots at scale. A third aim is to grow the robotics research community. The project will use a wide range of selection criteria to distribute the robots. This includes university types, locations, and researcher characteristics (e.g., career stage, roles). The selected research teams will receive onboarding and training. They will join community communication tools. There will be resources provided for developing reproducible studies using the Quori robots. A community governance and engagement structure will support the sustainability of the project.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.