A Novel Online Robot Design Research Platform to Determine Robot Mind Perception

A common issue encountered by practitioners of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is a lack of salient data to use in training. A common issue in Human-Robot Interaction is a gap in understanding how robot designs are perceived by the user. The ”D U Want to Build A Bot” (Build-A-Bot) project is developing a novel robotic design research platform implemented as a web-accessible 3D game that will allow us to quickly gather many user-provided robot design examples. These examples are then used to train ML models to better evaluate robot designs, predict how a design will be perceived, and create new robot designs. It is anticipated that we use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to predict how an existing robotic design will be perceived, and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create new robot designs based on the user-provided examples. This paper outlines the current and future work accomplished by an interdisciplinary student team at the University of Denver consisting of 14 undergraduate students across Computer Science, Music, Emergent Digital Practices, Psychology, and other related STEM fields that have created Build-A-Bot.