Robot designers and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) practitioners can face challenges when people form a mental model of a robot that is not appropriate. Although the field of robotics would benefit significantly from a broad representation of designers, there is currently no comprehensive method of including many people in the design process and no theory of what expectations a robot design feature might elicit. We seek to address these challenges through the creation of a robot design platform, an online tool similar to a character creation interface in a video game, where users create a robot design. By collecting a large number of robot designs from users, we seek to be able to identify aspects of a robot’s design that influence the mental models humans ascribe to the robot. To maximize the universal usability of the platform, we conducted a three-part survey to assess which icons should be used to visually represent the mental states ascribed to the robots created by users on the platform. In our assessment, we found nine icons that met our criteria for use in the platform and others that should be further evaluated.

This work presents our strategy for investigating the fundamental guidelines and theories related to robot mind perception, and for establishing a metric for mental models, using our web-based tool, Build-A-Bot. We also discuss the effectiveness and efficiency of our platform by virtue of its inclusive design and its ability to visualize the user’s intended representation of a mental model for a robot through a 3D game-like interface. We conducted an observational user test study to assess if the website and the embedded robot building tool are effective and efficient to use for users. We found that the design of the robot creation platform and its associated website are considered intuitive and effective by a majority of our survey population. The Build-A-Bot platform successfully provides the ability for users to visualize their ideal representation of their mental model through an interactive game. Based on the obtained data, we propose further steps to optimize the Build-A-Bot platform for universal usability

A common issue in Human-Robot Interaction is a gap in understanding how robot designs are perceived by the user. A common issue encountered by practitioners of Machine Learning (ML) is a lack of salient data to use in training. The “Build-A-Bot” project is developing a novel research platform implemented as a web-accessible 3D game that affords data collection of many user-provided robot designs. The designs are used to train ML models to better evaluate robot designs, predict how a design will be perceived using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and create new robot designs using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). This paper outlines the current and future work accomplished by an interdisciplinary undergraduate student team at the University of Denver across Computer Science, Music, Psychology, and other related STEM fields that have created Build-A-Bot.