Don Roboté: A Robot on a Quest (for love)

Concept:

Don Roboté is a robot that a team of three CMU students built for Prof. Illah Nourbakhsh’s class, Principles of Human-Robots Interaction. The goals of the project were to explore: 1) whether human users are willing to help a robot that asks for help, 2) how much effort will the human users be willing to put in an increasing order, and 3) whether adding theatrical personality to the made a difference in responses.

Scenario:

The robot is waiting around next to a vending machine. Whenever someone passes by, it asks for help. If a user is willing to help, then the robot asks to pull out coins from its backpack, retrieves a coke bottle from the vending machine. It then asks the person to place the coke into the backpack. The robot makes the last request, then, to shout out a phrase to praise the robot. The last step is to see if the human user is willing to go out of their way and perform tasks that might pose social awkwardness.

How-to:

The robot is built on atop of a PER (Personal Exploration Rover). A PVC pipe-based torso sits on atop of the PER’s chassis, and the head is modified to sit on atop of the torso. Qwerk board controls the servos, and a webcam and a set of speakers coming out of the board handles vision and speech. TeRK's Teleop Interface was adopted to provide GUI controller interface for teleop.

Official website:

Details of the project can be found on donrobote.wordpress.com.

Posted 8 months, 2 weeks ago by inbaelee