Tega: A social robot

Abstract

Abstract-Tega is a new expressive "squash and stretch", Androidbased social robot platform, designed to enable long-term interactions with children. I. A NEW SOCIAL ROBOT PLATFORMTega is the newest social robot platform designed and built by a diverse team of engineers, software developers, and artists at the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. This robot, with its furry, brightly colored appearance, was developed specifically to enable long-term interactions with children.Tega comes from a line of Android-based robots that leverage smartphones to drive computation and display an animated face [1]- [3]. The phone runs software for behavior control, motor control, and sensor processing. The phone's abilities are augmented with an external high-definition camera mounted in the robot's forehead and a set of on-board speakers.Tega's motion was inspired by "squash and stretch" principles of animation [4], creating natural and organic motion while keeping the actuator count low. Tega has five degrees of freedom: head up/down, waist-tilt left/right, waist-lean forward/back, full-body up/down, and full-body left/right. These joints are combinatorial and allow the robot to express behaviors consistently, rapidly, and reliably.The robot can run autonomously or can be remote-operated by a person through a teleoperation interface. The robot can operate on battery power for up to six hours before needing to be recharged, which allows for easier testing in the field. To that end, Tega was the robot platform used in a recent two-month study on second language learning conducted in three public school classrooms [5], [6].A variety of facial expressions and body motions can be triggered on the robot, such as laughter, excitement, and frustration. Additional animations can be developed on a computer model of the robot and exported via a software pipeline to a set of motor commands that can be executed on the physical robot, thus enabling rapid development of new expressive behaviors. Speech can be played back from prerecorded audio tracks, generated on the fly with a text-to-speech system, or streamed to the robot via a real-time voice streaming and pitch-shifting interface.This video showcases the Tega robot's design and implementation. It is a first look at the robot's capabilities as a research platform. The video highlights the robot's motion, expressive capabilities, and its use in ongoing studies of child-robot interaction.

Puffy: A Mobile Inflatable Interactive Companion for Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorder

“…Autonomous behavior is implemented only in few cases, to support a single type of tasks and to achieve a specific therapeutic goal [59] [TEO] such as imitation, communication or question answering. Autonomous socially assistive robots have been used successfully to attract attention, stimulate imitation, and improve communication, socialization, and behavioral skills [9] [38] needed for independent living.…”

“…A compact projector is embedded inside Puffy's body and displays visual stimuli (images, videos, or animations) on its belly (R7). These contents -which in rigid socially assistive robots are displayed using a tablet, a PC screen, or a smartphone placed on the body - [38] provide instructions, suggestions, or feedbacks (R11.a-b) for the tasks in which the children are involved, or are associated to the story Puffy is telling (as discussed later in the paper). Thanks to the white opaque light weighted plastic material and the shape of the inflatable body, projections result curve-rounded and with ambiguous borders that create a pleasant visual effect and enhance the sense of magic of the story being told, contributing to increase the affective bond with the robot (R11.g).…”

“…Puffy provides a unique combination of features that are important in robot-enhanced interventions for children with NDD and are seldom supported together in existing robots used in this domain. We have compared Puffy against 21 most relevant robots that, according to the existing literature, have been used in interventions for subjects with NDD: Bobus [47], CHARLIE [7], CPAC [47], DISKCAT [47], FACE [44], Infanoid [15], IROMEC [15], Jumbo [47], KASPAR [57], Keepon [22], Kismet [11], Maestro [47], Nao [30], Paro [66], Roball [47], Robota [5], SAM [19], Tega [38], Teo [10], TREVOR [15], Troy [15]. The source for our analysis has been research publications as well additional public materials e.g., web sites and online videos, which describe the design features of these robots and on-the-field case studies with NDD children.…”

Robot Dancer for Activities with People with Down Syndrome

“…Tega [6] is a robotic platform designed to interact with children through literacy applications during storytelling. PopBots [7] is another example of a sociable robot that is designed to help children learn about artificial intelligence (AI).…”

Do-It-Yourself Design for Social Robots: An Open-Source Hardware Platform to Encourage Innovation

“…While some work is being done to explore the effects of embodiment design in human-robot interaction (e.g. [7], [10]- [12]), most experiments consider the appearance of the robot as an external constraint, focusing their experimentation on other aspects of interaction. The current state of affairs is that many different studies are being conducted using the same robots (e.g.…”