Design and early evaluation of the RUBI-5 sociable robots

The RUBI project [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] started in 2004 with the goal of designing sociable robots for early childhood education. The project relies on an immersive, iterative approach to robot development and scientific progress. From the beginning of the project scientists and engineers immersed themselves at the Early Childhood Education Center at UC San Diego, designed robot prototypes to interact and teach toddlers in close collaboration with teachers, toddlers, and parents. As part of this process we learned many lessons on how to develop hardware and software components, that are safe, reliable, and that can withstand the rigors of daily interactions with toddlers. Here we present our last robot platforms: RUBI-5. The robot components are off-the-shelf and the 3D-CAD files are being made available for free to the research community to ease replication and adaptation by other groups. One of the goals of the new platform is to greatly accelerate the design, data-gathering, and statistical analysis of early education experiments.