In this article, we describe the development of an autonomous robot, Cherry the Little Red Robot, whose functionality we designed so that she could socially interact with humans on a daily basis in the context of an office suite environment. Cherry has a given set of office-tasks to accomplish, from giving tours of our computer science faculty suite to visitors, to serving beverages to those faculty and staff, and to engaging them in social interaction. We describe (1) our motivation for social informatics in human-robot interaction, (2) the hardware additions that we implemented for ActivMedia robot for our purposes, as well as (3) the Cherry’s multi-modal anthropomorphic interface that we developed capable of combining speech, face recognition, and emotional facial displays, and finally (4) our future research efforts.
