In more student work, our own Eric Rosen created a song and dance for our robots to better communicate with children. Check it out below!
Understanding the basic capabilities of robots will be important for everyone when they are integrated into our every day lives. Without this knowledge, human-robot interactions will be poor not only due to the inability to best utilize each agent’s skills, but may even lead people to fear what they don’t understand. There are many things that are scary when we first encounter them as young children, but become less so as we become accustomed to them. Educators use songs and dances in order to engage young students in a fun way to learn about common day things they will encounter in their life, such as the wheels on a bus. But what song and dance can you do with your child to teach them about robots?
We at the H2R lab made our own child-robot-song-and-dance, “The Grippers on the Robot” (Sung to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus”). Anyone can sing along and dance with Baxter through 3 preprogrammed dance sequences: The Grippers on the Robot go open and close; The servos on the robot go roll, pitch, yaw; The IK on the robot goes plan plan plan. This allows for young children to have a fun experience with a robot, and even start to understand how a robot navigates and manipulates the world!
If you want to let people dance and sing with your Baxter, check out the code on the github link or email me, eric_rosen@brown.edu!