Alter-Ego: A Mobile Robot With a Functionally Anthropomorphic Upper Body Designed for Physical Interaction

Historically, robots first found application in factories and plants. Until recently, the most noticeable examples of robot systems directly sold to the consumer were limited to edutainment systems (e.g., NAO [1]), automated chore robots [26], and social telepresence platforms [27]. Initially, telepresence robots consisted of a mobile base with an interactive screen. Today, following a trend of anthropomorphization of technology, human-like upper bodies have begun to replace those simple screens (e.g., Pepper [2] and R1 [3]) and share the same social communication modalities of humans, e.g., body posture, gestures, gaze direction, and facial expressions. Unfortunately, social robots are mostly designed to speak and make gestures and have limited capabilities when it comes to physically interacting with people and their surrounding environments.