Botson: An Accessible and Low-Cost Platform for Social Robotics Research

Trust remains a critical barrier to the effective integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into human-centric domains. Disembodied agents, such as voice assistants, often fail to establish trust due to their inability to convey non-verbal social cues. This paper introduces the architecture of Botson: an anthropomorphic social robot powered by a large language model (LLM). Botson was created as a low-cost and accessible platform for social robotics research.

SID: Stereo Image Dataset for Autonomous Driving in Adverse Conditions

Robust perception is critical for autonomous driving, especially under adverse weather and lighting conditions that commonly occur in real-world environments. In this paper, we introduce the Stereo Image Dataset (SID), a large-scale stereo-image dataset that captures a wide spectrum of challenging real-world environmental scenarios. Recorded at a rate of 20 Hz using a ZED stereo camera mounted on a vehicle, SID consists of 27 sequences totaling over 178k stereo image pairs that showcase conditions from clear skies to heavy snow, captured during the day, dusk, and night. The dataset includes detailed sequence-level annotations for weather conditions, time of day, location, and road conditions, along with instances of camera lens soiling, offering a realistic representation of the challenges in autonomous navigation. Our work aims to address a notable gap in research for autonomous driving systems by presenting high-fidelity stereo images essential for the development and testing of advanced perception algorithms. These algorithms support consistent and reliable operation across variable weather and lighting conditions, even when handling challenging situations like lens soiling. SID is publicly available at: https://doi.org/10.7302/esz6-nv83.