Huggable

Social robots (personal robots) emphasize individualized social interaction and communication with people. To maximize communication capacity of a personal robot, designers make it more anthropomorphic (or zoomorphic), and people tend to interact more naturally with such robots. However, adapting anthropomorphism (or zoomorphism) in social robots makes morphology of a robot more complex; thus, it becomes harder to control robots with existing interfaces. The Huggable is a robotic Teddy bear platform developed by the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. It has its specific purpose in healthcare, elderly care, education, and family communication. It is important that a user can successfully convey the meaningful context in a dialogue via the robot’s puppeteering interface. I investigate relevant technologies to develop a robotic puppetry system for a zoomorphic personal robot and develop three different puppeteering interfaces to control the robot: the website interface, wearable interface, and sympathetic interface. The wearable interface was examined through a performance test and the web interface was examined through a user study.

Please visit the group’s webpage for details and demo videos

J. K. Lee, W. D. Stiehl, R. Toscano, C. Breazeal (2009) “Semi-Autonomous Robot Avatar as a Medium for Family Communication and Education,” Advanced Robotics, Vol. 23(14), pp 1925- 1945.

W. D. Stiehl, J. K. Lee, C. Breazeal, M. Nalin, A. Morandi, and A. Sanna (2009) “The Huggable: A Platform for Research in Robotic Companions for Pediatric Care,” in Workshop on Creative Interactive Play for Disabled Children held at the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC2009) Como, Italy

W. D. Stiehl, J. K. Lee, and C. Breazeal (2009), “The Huggable Project: Building a Personal Robotic Companion System For Healthcare, Education, Family Communication, and Entertainment”, In CHI 2009 Workshop on The Reign of Catz and Dogz.

J. K. Lee (2009), “Affordable Avatar Control System for Personal Robots”, Master’s Thesis, Massacchusetts Institute of Technology.

W. D. Stiehl, J. K. Lee, R. Toscano, and C. Breazeal (2008), “The Huggable: A Platform for Research in Robotic Companions for Eldercare”, presented at AAAI Fall Symposium on AI in Eldercare, Washington, D.C., 2008.

J. K. Lee, R. L. Toscano, W. D. Stiehl and C. Breazeal (2008), “The Design of a Semi-Autonomous Robot Avatar for Family Communication and Education”, Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

Stiehl, W. D., Breazeal, C., Lee, J. K., Maymin, A. Z., Knight, H., Toscano, R., and Cheung, I. M., “Interactive Systems Employing Robotic Companions”, U.S. Patent, 8,909,370, Filed in May, 2008, and Issued in Dec, 2014.