Group work and collaborators
This concept was developed during the second Social Robot Design session as part of Group 1. The aim of the session was to explore ...
Collaborators:
Maurits Dijkman, Bianca Filip, Ewoud Janus, Emilia Pavel, and Gijs Vis
My contribution:
...
Reflection
This first session helped us shift from thinking about "what robot should we build?" to "how can we find out what needs to be built?" That distinction is important because pets have different preferences, fears, and play behaviours. What feels playful or calming for one animal might be boring or frightening for another. A modular toolkit could make it easier to test different interaction ideas before committing to a final robot design.
The most useful insight for me was that the robot does not need to be fully functional at the start. By using puppeteering, low-fidelity prototypes, and acted scenarios, we can already discover important design constraints, such as movement speed, safety, material choice, and how a pet might respond to different modules. This makes the toolkit useful not only as a possible robot concept but also as a design method for exploring pet-specific interactions.