EvaSIM: a Software Simulator for the EVA Open-source Robotics Platform

Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have successfully been used in various types of health therapies as nonpharmacological interventions. A SAR called EVA (Embodied Voice Assistant) is an open-source robotics platform intended to serve as a tool to support research in Human-Robot Interaction. The EVA robot was originally developed to assist in nonpharmacological interventions for people with Dementia and has more recently been applied for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. EVA provides multimodal interactions such as verbal and non-verbal communication, facial recognition and light sensory effects. Although EVA uses low-cost hardware and open-source software, it is not always possible, or practical, to have a physical robot at hand, particularly during rapid iterative cycles of design and evaluation of therapies. Thus, our motivation to develop a simulator that allows testing the scripts of therapies to be enacted by the EVA robot. This work proposes EvaSIM (EVA Robot Simulator), a simulator that can interpret an EVA script code and emulate the multimodal interaction capabilities of the physical robot, such as Text-To-Speech, facial expression recognition, controlling light sensory effects, etc. Several EVA scripts were run using the simulator attesting that they have the same behaviour as the physical robot. EvaSIM can serve as a support tool in the teaching/learning process of the robot's scripting language, enabling the training of technicians and therapists in script development and testing for the EVA robot.