My thesis was within the realm of social robotics, where robots and humans communicate without the former scaring the latter. I worked with Union College's social robot SARAH. Her name stands for Socially Acceptable Robot that Approaches for Help, though in my experiments she did not approach for help.

I focused on the engagement aspect of interaction, where the robot needs to attract people's attention in order to get them to engage in a conversation with her.

My thesis question: Does turning in place and greeting people attract their attention more than staying stationary to greet them, such that those people are more inclined to help SARAH with a simple task?

Within this repository I uploaded the files I used to control SARAH and my actual thesis paper.