Social Robot Development Team - Capstone Project

Team Members

Andrew Texeira, Rex Allen Gonzalez, Deep Akbari, Sofia Cobo Navas, Thuc Anh Nguyen
Five undergraduate students at University of South Florida

Mentoring Period

May 2025 – Present
RARE Lab Social Project, Tampa, FL, USA

Project Focus

Socially Assistive Robotics for Elderly Care

Project Overview

Leading the development of a socially assistive robot designed to support older adults through interactive engagement and assistance.

Mentoring Activities

Technical Leadership

• Robot Shell Design: Advised on robot shell design to ensure user acceptance while allowing proper integration of all hardware components
• Speech Integration: Guided the implementation of speech-to-text modules and robot emotional motion design for natural and engaging interactions
• AI Development: Mentored the development of text-to-speech functionality and custom LLM prompts for personalized dialogue generation

Advanced Features

• Computer Vision: Supported camera-based face recognition pipeline development for context-aware human-robot interaction
• User Interface: Mentored UI design (Flask) and development for user information input, ensuring accessibility and ease of use for the experimenter
• System Integration: Supervised integration of multiple subsystems into cohesive robot platform

Technical Stack

• Hardware Integration: Multi-component robot system design
• Natural Language Processing: Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, custom LLM integration
• Computer Vision: Face recognition and tracking systems
• Web Development: Flask-based user interface
• Human-Robot Interaction: Emotional motion design and social robotics principles

Skills Developed by Team

• Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Hardware-software integration
• Social Robotics: Understanding of HRI principles and elderly care applications
• AI/ML Implementation: Practical application of NLP and computer vision
• User-Centered Design: Accessibility and usability considerations
• Project Management: Large-scale collaborative development

Project Impact

This capstone project addresses real-world challenges in elderly care through innovative robotics solutions, providing students with valuable experience in socially assistive robotics while contributing to meaningful research in human-robot interaction.

Current Status

Ongoing - Project continues with regular mentoring sessions and milestone reviews to ensure successful completion and deployment.