MOSAIC: A Reusable Modular Social Robot Platform for Child-Centered Co-Design

To ensure that social robots designed for children actually suit their wants and needs, employing participatory methods such as co-design is crucial. However, there is a lack of suitable platforms that can showcase hard- and software capabilities of social robots, while still being adaptable for the intended use case. Thus, in this work, we present MOSAIC, a Modular Open System for Adaptive Interaction and Co-design. It includes sensors to detect human proximity, touch, externally induced movement, and audio, as well as LEDs and a speaker to enable both verbal and nonverbal interaction. It has three embodiment types: humanoid, zoomorphic, and abstract to suit different age groups and application domains. MOSAIC is an openly accessible and dynamically evolving toolkit, with which we aim to support the community in designing social robots not just for, but with, children.