Trust remains a critical barrier to the effective integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into human-centric domains. Disembodied agents, such as voice assistants, often fail to establish trust due to their inability to convey non-verbal social cues. This paper introduces the architecture of Botson: an anthropomorphic social robot powered by a large language model (LLM). Botson was created as a low-cost and accessible platform for social robotics research.
@article{arxiv.2602.19491,
title = {Botson: An Accessible and Low-Cost Platform for Social Robotics Research},
author = {Samuel Bellaire and Abdalmalek Abu-raddaha and Natalie Kim and Nathan Morhan and William Elliott and Samir Rawashdeh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.19491},
year = {2026}
}