ROSBOT: A low-cost autonomous social robot

We present a low-cost social robot system composed of a mobile base (a robotic cleaner, $150), an Intel RealSense RGB-D camera ($100), a touch screen powerful laptop ($800), the ROS(Robot Operating System) ($0) and the Intel RealSense SDK ($0). This social robot has the capability of autonomously navigating in an unstructured and dynamic environment, avoiding collisions with stationary or dynamic obstacles and generating rich social behaviors (such as face detection, hand tracking, take pictures, interact with social networks, etc.). Taking advantage of plenty of open source packages in the ROS and Intel cutting edge perceptual computing software, this social robot system allows researchers and school students to rapidly reproduce an affordable and ideal hardware/software platform for their robotics-related research and education. Such a low-cost robot is expected to lead to faster progress in robotics-related application development and research, such as robot-human interaction, social communication, networking robots and even other non-robotic fields.