Do-It-Yourself Design for Social Robots

Autor: Jelle Saldien, Francis wyffels, Bram Vanderborght, Cesar Vandevelde
Přispěvatelé: Applied Mechanics, Faculty of Engineering, Robotics & Multibody Mechanics Research Group
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2017
Předmět:
DOI: 10.1109/mra.2016.2639059
Popis: One of the biggest obstacles to achieve a broader adoption of robotics is that only experienced roboticists can develop robotics applications. If we aim to have robots in our homes and offices, we need more tools and platforms that reduce the costs of prototyping robots, in terms of both money and time. The open source paradigm offers a potential solution for these key factors. However, creating open source robotics hardware pertains to more than merely making the design files available online. It is essential to design the hardware in such a way that it can be built and modified by non-expert users. In this article we summarize our experiences of four years of creating open source robotics in academia that led to the social robot Ono and the Opsoro design toolkit for social robots. We detail our design approach, leveraging DIY-friendly techniques to create systems that, though complex, can be assembled and modified by novices. We describe four experiments, two focusing on the assembly of an open source robot and two focusing on using our toolkit to create novel social robot embodiments. They show that the key elements to attract novices are the ability to built, hack and use a social robot platform at different levels of difficulty. We believe that the open source approach holds much promise in robotics research, though this approach is not without its challenges. The main bottlenecks are: the lack of time for ancillary activities related to open source, the difficulty of building communities around niche research topics and the challenge of consolidating open hardware approaches with traditional business models.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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