| The Social Humanoid Autonomous Robotic Platform (SHARP) project is an android project that was created with the intent of making learning about androids and robotics easier for the novice, diverse for the expert, educational in the classroom, and useful in the home or business. The project centers itself on its simplicity, low cost, and expandability. This paper illustrates how the SHARP Project has the potential to be an affordable fit in nearly every modern setting. The introduction of the SHARP project lays the groundwork for people of many ages, incomes, and educational levels to take advantage of robotics technology. The SHARP project features research based, in part, on a personal android project named "G.E.N.E.S.I.S." as an example of the SHARP project's features. The features of G.E.N.E.S.I.S. include voice recognition, speech synthesis, and responses to various sensor stimuli which help encourage human-robot interaction. This study uses survey results to examine the factors that make these robots desirable to consumers and identifies which factors make some robots more sociable than others. The study concludes with an evaluation of the G.E.N.E.S.I.S. robotic platform and suggests an appropriate market niche for this and other similar sociable humanoid robotic platforms.;Keywords: android, human-robot interaction (HRI), sociable robots, humanoid robots, GENESIS, G.E.N.E.S.I.S., SHARP Project. |
