Flexi: A robust and flexible social robot embodiment kit
P. Alves-Oliveira et al., “Flexi: A robust and flexible social robot embodiment kit,” in Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, New York, NY, USA, 2022, pp. 1177–1191, doi: 10.1145/3532106.3533541.
Abstract
The social robotics market is appealing yet challenging. Though social robots are built few remain on the market for long. Many reasons account for their short lifespan with costs and context-specificity ranking high amount them. In this work, we designed, fabricated, and developed FLEXI, a social robot embodiment kit that enabled unlimited customization, making it applicable for a broad range of use cases. The hardware and software of FLEXI were entirely developed by this research team from scratch. FLEXI includes a rich set of materials and attachment pieces to allow for a diverse range of hardware customizations that ensure the embodiment is appropriate for specific customer/researcher projects. It also includes an open-source end-user programming interface to lower the barrier of robotics access to interdisciplinary teams that populate the field of Human-Robot Interaction. We present an iterative development of this cost-effective kit through the lenses of case studies, conceptual research, and soft deployment of FLEXI in three application scenarios: community-support, mental health, and education. Additionally, we provide in open-access the full list of materials and a tutorial to fabricate FLEXI, making it accessible to any maker space, research lab, or workshop space interested in working with or learning about social robots.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{alves2022flexi,
title = {Flexi: A robust and flexible social robot embodiment kit},
author = {Alves-Oliveira, Patricia and Bavier, Matthew and Malandkar, Samrudha and Eldridge, Ryan and Sayigh, Julie and Bj{\"o}rling, Elin A and Cakmak, Maya},
year = {2022},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference},
pages = {1177–1191},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3532106.3533541},
type = {conference},
isbn = {9781450393584},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
doi = {10.1145/3532106.3533541},
numpages = {15},
keywords = {Authors Keywords - Social robotics, fabrication, open access, robot kit},
location = {Virtual Event, Australia},
series = {DIS '22}
}