ShyBot
How people with autism to debug internal feelings in physical ways.
Jackie Lee, Kyunghee Kim
Cynthia Breazeal, Rosalind Picard
MIT MEDIA LAB
jackylee@media.mit.edu
News: Shybot will be presented in CHI '08 work-in-progress.
Introduction
Shybot is a personal mobile robot designed to both embody and elicit reflection on shyness behaviors. Shybot is being designed to detect human presence and familiarity from face detection and proximity sensing in order to categorize people as friends or strangers to interact with. Shybot also can reflect elements of the anxious state of its human companion through LEDs and a spinning propeller. We designed this simple social interaction to open up a new direction for intervention for children living with autism. We hope that from minimal social interaction, a child with autism or social anxiety disorders could reflect on and more deeply attain understanding about personal shyness behaviors, as a first step toward helping make progress in developing greater capacity for complex social interaction.
Being shy could be the first social expression to any social situation. ShyBot is a robotic car with a camera as eyes to see if strange people are around it. It runs away if it detects a strange face using face recognition. A shy autistic individual could get started to understand the behavior of shyness from the audience perspective. By putting him/her outside the situation of being shy, s/he could get a better understanding by watching and interacting from an audience viewpoint. ShyBot allows children to experience the limited/abstract social entity like shyness by playing with it. ShyBot also enables an interactive play stage for people around it. For example, a child could play hide-and-seek with ShyBot.
ShyBot is equipped with 4-wheel motor mechanism powered by Arduino BT electronic I/O board and a wireless camera with OpenCV face-tracking feature. There are two mirrors placed around the wireless camera so that people can find their faces through the mirror when staring at it. At the same time, the wireless camera also transmits the face images back to the main program written in Max/Msp/Jitter in Mac OS X on a MacBook Pro. The system is constantly looking for faces and drive the motor to be away from any faces.
Publication
Lee, C.H., Kim, K., Breazeal, C., Picard, R.W. Shybot: Friend-Stranger Interaction for Children Living with Autism, Work-In-Progress in the Extended Abstract of CHI 2008, April 5-10, 2008, Florence, Italy (to appear) (Full-text PDF)
(Last updated on April 16, 2009 )
