Spidey: a Robotic Tabletop Assistant

Abstract

This paper presents our efforts of exploring the possibilities of combining tabletop robots and assistant robots. Our paper presents the design and prototyping of Spidey, a robotic assistant on a tabletop environment which works together as a team member with its human companions, aware of their tabletop actions and reacting or initiating tabletop actions according to the task requirements. Spidey is designed both as a proof of concept, suggesting the benefits, and reflecting on the limitations of a robotic assistant in an interactive reservoir engineering tabletop visualization application we are implementing. This paper motivates our concept of a robotic tabletop assistant, and outlines our design efforts and the current Spidey prototype