Bringing Robots To Life Applying Principles Of Animation To Robots Albert J.N. van Breemen Software Architecture Group Philips Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands CHI2004

2 Research About Albert van Breemen Live in Belgium Background electrical engineering (1997) PhD “Agent-Based Multi-Controller Systems” (2001) Software Architect for Intelligent System at Philips Research “NatLab”, Eindhoven, the Netherlands

3 Research High Tech Campus Eindhoven (The Netherlands) Facts & Figures Campus site: 910,000 m², 25 new buildings, investment of Euro 600 million, 7-8,000 people by Over 8000 m² clean room, 50,000 m² lab, 100,000 m² office-space and m² development space.

4 Research User-Interface Robots Explorative research started in 2001 Aim: develop UI Robot that: –is enjoyable to interact with (fun!), –is situated in an home environment. First approach: just built it!

5 Research “Lino” Built from standard (robot) components (mobile Pioneer platform, 3 laptops, etc.) Special head to show facial expressions. Localizes and navigates itself through the HomeLab.

6 Research Lino Facial Expressions

7 Research Lessons learned Users like (and react to) Lino’s facial expressions, but … …just using facial expressions is not enough to create a believable robot. “Emotional” intelligence is more important than “problem solving” intelligence. (You don’t want to best chess player in your house, you just want a UI robot that is fun!)

8 Research Bringing Robots to Life Idea: If 2D characters on a screen can be brought to life by using animation techniques, can we then use the same techniques to bring robots to life?

9 Research Step 1: use an improved robot “iCat”

10 Research Step 2: Study World of Animation There exists 12 basic principles of animation: –Anticipation, –Slow in and slow out, –Follow through, –Overlapping action, –etc. Most of them can be applied to robots!!!

11 Research Step 3: develop new tools and robot architecture

12 Research Step 4: The Result 1

13 Research Step 4: The Result 2

14 Research Conclusions and Summary Traditionally, a robot’s task is aimed at realizing goals. Therefore, reasoning and planning is important. The aim of UI robots is foremost believability. This requires new approaches to develop these robots. The world of animation (and animatronics) provides good techniques and principles to develop UI robots.