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

Quori 2.0：围绕模块化社交机器人平台团结、扩大和维持一个研究社区机器人研究的一个重大挑战是缺乏一个共同的机器人来工作。如果研究人员使用不同类型的机器人，这些机器人通常具有不同的形状、大小、传感器和功能，那么通常很难比较结果。为了应对这一挑战，将建造50个人形机器人（称为“Quori”）。开发的Quori机器人将分发给美国各地的研究团队。这些机器人将作为一个标准化的机器人平台，创建一个机器人社区基础设施，以推进科学的机器人研究。这项工作建立在先前项目的成功基础上，该项目设计、制造和测试了10个Quori原型机器人，并将它们授予了一小部分美国研究团队。目前的项目结合了从Quori原型开发中吸取的经验教训，以改进机器人的设计，对其进行调整，使其更容易大规模生产，并将其分发给更广泛的研究团队。该项目通过在线协作工具、定期活动和合作机会将使用Quori机器人的学生和研究人员联系起来。这将在全国范围内建立一个机器人专家社区，可以相互学习，分享想法，并允许机器人研究的快速发展。该项目的一个重点是包括不同的机器人研究人员组成的新团队，并将他们与更有经验的机器人社区成员配对。这将增加美国机器人和STEM（科学、技术、工程和数学）研究人员的多样性。该项目将加快研究进展的步伐，特别是在人机交互（HRI）领域。该奖项建立在一个成功的先前项目的基础上，该项目为全国各地的人力资源研究所研究团队设计、实施和部署了数量有限的原型Quori类人机器人。该项目将利用最初原型部署的反馈来重新设计机器人，使其更适合大规模生产。该项目的中心目标是为HRI研究建立一个通用的硬件和软件平台，并围绕这个机器人平台建立一个研究人员社区。这些努力受到Willow Garage的PR2 Beta计划的强烈影响，该计划使用PR2机器人和现在非常流行的机器人操作系统（ROS）建立了一个连接世界各地研究人员的社区。通用硬件和软件平台基础设施的开发，使学生和研究人员能够快速、轻松地共享结果并进行复制研究，以推进该国的机器人技术。机器人的分配将基于一个包容性的选择标准，该标准考虑了大学类型、地点、研究人员的职业阶段和其他因素的多样性。该项目将建立一个由使用Quori 2.0机器人的学生和研究人员组成的包容性社区，有意专注于引入新社区成员的机制，扩大机器人研究社区的多样性，并确保他们在使用Quori 2.0平台时得到支持。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.