Fix-My-Robot
In the near future, robots could develop human-like intelligence and personalities. Greater integration of robots into the workforce will increase human-robot interactions and create new challenges, like robots struggling to account for nuanced human behavior and mismatched personalities.
To address this, stores like “Fix My Robot” could help customize traits and run simulations, ensuring robots align better with customer preferences and interact more effectively with humans.
Customers can schedule or walk in for an appointment. A behavioral consultation has the customer, their robot, and a staff member work together to adjust a robot’s personality traits through a modification installed onto the robot. Another type of appointment involves using virtual reality to simulate specific work scenarios.
If the robot needs further adjustments or is damaged, the customer can schedule another session, and the robot will be safely stored in the store in one of the storage cabinets.
Students: Francisco Arroja, Kjell de Wit, Sebastian Abu-Hamdan, Valeria Valencia Tirado & Yumo Zhang
Some difficulties arose during the production process.
For example, Mirte did not have strong enough motors to drive it, making it difficult to move smoothly with the weight of the robot’s shell added, so Mirte was modified.
Also, different methods were tried to make the robot appear in both real world and VR scenes, including trying to get the VR device to turn on passthrough mode.
The robot model was added to Unity. The script was mounted on the model, making it possible to adjust the speed and direction. So that it could manipulate the robot in the real world and the robot in the VR scene at the same time.
The sign logo was laser cut to make it stand out, and the base plate was replaced with a white one, in order to make the sign look clean enough. A border was added to slightly cover the led strip to prevent it from being too exposed while the cut-out design ensured that the light from the strip would shine through.
We wanted to make the final prototype look like a real workshop. This shelf is for robots waiting to be repaired, like a cage in a pet store. But for the robots it is more like a separate waiting room.