This work is about FLEXI: a robust and flexible social robot embodiment kit.
My name is Patricia Alves-Oliveira, and I collaborated with Matthew, Sam, Ryan, Julie,
Elin, and Maya.
We are from the University of Washington in Seattle.
The size and potential of social robot markets have been positive.
Insights from reports tell us that this is a rapidly growing market, increasing by millions
every year.
Despite being an appealing market, it is also a challenging one as many robot companies
are failing.
We want to highlight cost and customization as two of the many reasons why companies might
be failing.
To address these reasons, we developed FLEXI, a low cost and flexible social robot, which
I will be presenting.
But before going into the specifics of FLEXI, let’s look at the spectrum of the social
robots that exist today.
This is how the majority of social robots look like today.
Or this one.
The list goes on.
These robots look alike because they share some design features.
Can you identify them?
The first common feature is that social robots tend to be designed using only the color white.
Their shells are made of hard plastic affording little tactile and soft interactions.
They usually assume a humanoid shape.
According to the widely studied Uncanny Valley phenomenon, humanoids can create unrealistic
expectations of human-like behavior and interactions, which are detrimental to a robots’s acceptance.
Customization of the robot’s embodiment is really not possible since robots are sold
in their final “polished” state.
The lack of hardware-customizable social robots forces researchers to commit financial and
labor resources to an embodiment that actually restricts the application areas they want
to study.
Frustrated with this, roboticists have been developing their own robots.
So let’s look at some of them disruptive robot designs created.
The Blossom robot lets users customize wool covers to place over the robot’s core and
enables soft interactions.
YOLO robot has an abstract shape, moving away from humanoid designs and showing that we
can interact with robots that are not humanoids.
Ranger robot introduces wood as a new warm and organic material that robots can be made
of.
OPSORO robot enables personalized customization because we can design different faces for
this robot using different materials.
While this is great, to see more robots coming out from research labs, it actually takes
years to develop a robot from scratch and this is not something affordable for everyone.
This paper surfaces the unlimited space for social robot design that has been so far untapped.
Let’s look at the design space of social robots.
Consider the pink circle as the entire design space.
Current social robot platforms only target a few of these spaces.
Disruptive designs have been opening up new features for robots.
But actually there is an unlimited design space that has been untapped and that can
consider robots to have different colors, heights, materials, shapes, and forms.
To address this, we designed, developed, and fabricated FLEXI robot.
FLEXI is a social robot kit that enables unlimited customization, making it applicable for a
broad range of use cases.
These are some of the design questions that lead our work.
We followed a complete design process for FLEXI
That started with a need finding study to identify the paint points of current robots
and design principles for new ones.
We then adopted conceptual design to explore the big vision for FLEXI.
When we arrived to concrete design ideas, we initiated tangible prototyping, which enables
early testing with users.
We used storyboards to understand the feasibility of FLEXI across different application scenarios.
And we finished by evaluating the usability of these scenarios using soft deployment studies.
Our need findings study consisted of interviews with 10 participants experts in the field
of human-robot interaction.
The interviews were conducted in zoom and had the goal of collecting the pain points
that they face using current social robot platforms.
We identified a set of pain points that are mapped into design principles.
For example, Cost is a pain point.
Specifically, participants voiced that robots have unnecessary functionalities that make
them very expensive.
For example, they have sensors that are mostly not used and re-paved by external ones.
We moved on to conceptually design FLEXI.
Following a series of brainstorming and sketching sessions, we collected a varied of ideas that
could fulfill the identified pain points when designing FLEXI.
We then choose a subset of these ideas that proved stronger or more feasible and transferred
them to more detailed sketches, considering also hardware specifications.
For example, a feature we identified as unique to FLEXI was the possibility to change the
robot’s embodiment by attaching different pieces to its core, as shown in these sketches.
We followed with storyboarding to create a deeper understanding of the feasibility of
using FLEXI in human-robot interactions.
The first case study is community, addressing how a robot can help support a community.
We identified attachment parts to attach to the robot core, such as a mailbox to leave
messages, or a mini-printer.
Next, I will show an example of a storyboard.
The Happy Mail Robot is part of a university campus and is meant to encourage students.
You can see the student Nora needing some encouragement after a tough day.
Nora approaches the robot and the robot contains a message which Nora clicks on it.
The message was sent by someone named Kate to Nora, and says “Believe in yourself.
You got this!”
Nora smiles as she needed to hear this to be reminded that she is doing her best, even
on this difficult day.
She secretly thanks Kate, who she actually has never met.
She likes this message so much that Nora decides to print it using the robot’s mini printer.
This way, she can carry the message with her anytime she needs a reminder.
To test the usability of a community robot we delivered FLEXI core to a human-robot interaction
researcher external to this project.
The researcher designed and assembled attachment pieces for this scenario, and programmed the
robot.
The robot was tested with 10 people in a university campus and results show high usability and
an expansion of creativity as a content creator for the robot.
You will now see videos from the soft deployment study.
In this case, two participants decide to engage with FLEXI and write a message for the next
student that interacts with the robot.
We also explored storyboards for educational and mental health case studies.
Regarding the specs of FLEXI hardware, this robot has a capacitive sensor for touch.
It has a smartphone as a face screen and a tablet on the belly that enables user inputs
such as voice recognition, camera, and touch.
The robot has four dynamixel motors that enable engaging behaviors such as tilting for active
listening.
Also, the robot has a core that enables to attach pieces to it and design for each scenario.
The exciting part is that anyone can build their own FLEXI robot!
The complete Bill of Materials can be found in the pictorial.
The list of custom-made parts is also available with specifications for printing or cutting.
The assembly tutorial to put all the parts together is also available in the pictorial.
The software of FLEXI was also created by this research team and is available to use
in open-access.
This is how the software looks like:
You can create your robot face or select one face from a set of pre-defined ones.
The parameters of the face can be easily changed and adjusted with sliders.
The belly screen of the robot can be personalized by adding a new belly screen as shown here.
There are templates you can use too.
The robot can be controlled through a wizard of oz interface, easy to navigate that enables
the control of the robot motors and screens.
You can render your robot designs on a computer, phone, or in the actual physical robot.
For those interested in coding, new programs can be added to the robot too.
There is also the possibility to modify existing programs that already are in the robot.
We now show a few prototypes that we also developed and that can be easily done by anyone
interested in robotics.
We used prototyping materials such as these ones.
We started by creating new embodiment for FLEXI.
For example, we created a cactus robot.
An aquarium robot that serves not only the purpose of direct human-robot interaction
but also serves as a calming device for presence.
And we re-created some design ideas shared by participants, such as a robot with no belly
desired by a 6 years old participant.
We continued creating more designs, showing the flexibility of this robot.
Accompanying this submission is the unboxing guide for FLEXI.
While FLEXI is not a product, we conceptually designed an unboxing video to inspire future
users of this robot!
The full video can be seen in the pictorial.
For additional details on this work, we invite you to read and enjoy our pictorial.
And let us know if you ever build a FLEXI robot!