PuppetAI: A Customizable Platform for Designing Tactile-Rich Affective Robot Interaction
This work provides an accessible and adaptable foundation for researchers to design and refine expressive gestures in social robots, addressing the need for customizable tactile interaction platforms.
PuppetAI introduces a modular soft robot interaction platform with a cable-driven actuation system and a customizable gesture framework, enabling real-time emotional gestural responses to human vocal input. The platform reduces operational complexity and production costs while enhancing customizability for tactile-rich affective robot interaction.
We introduce PuppetAI, a modular soft robot interaction platform. This platform offers a scalable cable-driven actuation system and a customizable, puppet-inspired robot gesture framework, supporting a multitude of interaction gesture robot design formats. The platform comprises a four-layer decoupled software architecture that includes perceptual processing, affective modeling, motion scheduling, and low-level actuation. We also implemented an affective expression loop that connects human input to the robot platform by producing real-time emotional gestural responses to human vocal input. For our own designs, we have worked with nuanced gestures enacted by "soft robots" with enhanced dexterity and "pleasant-to-touch" plush exteriors. By reducing operational complexity and production costs while enhancing customizability, our work creates an adaptable and accessible foundation for future tactile-based expressive robot research. Our goal is to provide a platform that allows researchers to independently construct or refine highly specific gestures and movements performed by social robots.