Nelson: a low-cost social robot for research and education

A social robot is a robotic platform that supports natural interaction with people in a human-scale environment. Such a platform allows interesting opportunities for both traditional Computer Science students and students from other disciplines, such as psychology, philosophy, design and communications. In this paper, we describe a new social robotic platform for educational uses that is equipped with a social face, arms for gesturing, advanced sensory, mobile base, and ROS integration. By using off-the-shelf and rapidly prototyped components, together with open source software, this platform is low-cost, easy to use, and easy to reproduce.