MERTZ: a quest for a robust and scalable active vision humanoid head robot

We present the design and construction of MERTZ, an active-vision humanoid head robot, with the immediate goal of having the robot runs continuously for many hours a day without supervision at various locations. We address how the lack of robustness and reliability lead to limitations and scalability issues in research robotic platforms. We propose to attend to these issues in parallel with the course of robot development. Drawing from lessons learned from our previous robots, we incorporated various fault prevention strategies into the electromechanical design. We have implemented a preliminary system, integrating sensorimotor, vision, and audio in order to test the full range of all degrees of freedom and enable the robot to engage in simple visual and verbal interaction with people. We conducted a series of experiment where the robot ran for $2 hours within 9 days at different public spaces. The robot interacted with a large number of passersby and collected at least 100,000 face images of at least 600 individuals within 4 days. We learned various lessons involving the robustness of current design and identified a set of failure modes. Lastly, we present the long term research direction for the robot.