Designing Robots with Movement in Mind
! ! ! ! ! Designing Robots with Movement in Mind ! ! Guy Hoffman Media Innovation Lab, IDC Herzliya and Wendy Ju Center for Design Research, Stanford University ! This paper makes the case for designing interactive robots with their expressive movement in mind. As people are highly sensitive to physical movement and spatiotemporal affordances, well-designed robot motion can communicate, engage, and offer dynamic possibilities beyond the machines’ surface appearance or pragmatic motion paths. We present techniques for movement centric design, including character animation sketches, video prototyping, interactive movement explorations, Wizard of Oz studies, and skeletal prototypes. To illustrate our design approach, we discuss four case studies: a social head for a robotic musician, a robotic speaker dock listening companion, a desktop telepresence robot, and a service robot performing assistive and communicative tasks. We then relate our approach to the design of non-anthropomorphic robots and robotic objects, a design strategy that could facilitate the feasibility of real- world human-robot interaction. Keywords: human-robot interaction, design, non-humanoid, non-anthropomorphic, gestures, movement, case studies, expressive movement ! 1. Introduction As robots enter applications where they operate around, before, and with humans, it is important for robot designers to consider the way the robot’s physical actions are interpreted by people around them. In the past, robots’ actions were mainly observed by trained operators. However, if we are to deploy robots in more lay contexts—in homes and offices, in schools, on streets, or on stages—the quality of these robots’ motion is crucial. It is therefore time to consider more seriously the expressive power of a robot’s movement, beyond the crude, choppy, and awkward mannerisms they are famous for.
[Show full text]