DU Build-A-Bot

The increasing integration of robots into our daily lives makes it crucial to study human-robot interactions. The project I worked on during the summer, in which I am still actively participating, aims to gain insight into how robots can be designed to better meet human needs and preferences by using a variety of research methods, including user studies, surveys, and observational studies. Moreover, we aim to understand the complex and nuanced perceptions of robots that are influenced by the physical design of a robot and its impact on the quality of human-robot interactions. Over the summer, I worked on debugging and adding features to our online platform that will enable us to collect data on human perception of robots through gamification of the robot building process. Additionally, I spent time learning 3D modeling and printing techniques with the aim of printing physical robot parts from our model library to allow children who are not technologically literate to participate in our study. Finally, I contributed to a research paper that we published and two other papers that are in the process of being reviewed. Over the summer until now, our platform has gone through major improvements as a result of our continuous research and user testing. We have improved our platform to be more accessible by applying the concept of universal usability and reducing computational costs on the user's end. Moving forward, I will be working to further improve the usability of our platform by performing user testing and implementing various data analysis schemes. I will also be working with the psychology department to perform a study on the user's mental activation for different traits of a robot.