As domestic environments are increasingly required to meet diverse and changing human needs within constrained spaces, physical reconfigurability offers a promising solution. We developed a full-scale, manipulable room prototype as an exploratory co-design instrument, enabling participants to bodily explore and reflect on reconfigurable living spaces. Through 12 sessions with 30 participants involving brainstorming, bodystorming, and interviews, we identified spatial design patterns and elicited perspectives on reconfigurable domestic environments. Our findings contribute a design pattern catalogue for reconfigurable spaces, alongside insights into the lived experience of reconfigurability. We also discuss design principles, three affordance-based design dimensions that capture value tensions: empowering vs. restrictive, utilitarian vs. hedonic, and futuristic vs. practical, as well as lessons from co-design with a room-scale prototype. We demonstrate agile, room-scale prototyping as a methodological approach for spatial HCI research, advancing toward human-computer habitation, where interactive systems become inhabited built environments that support human values, creativity, and autonomy.

Dental clinics can be challenging sensory environments, creating discomfort and stress, especially for neurodivergent individuals with Sensory Processing Disorder. Interactive environmental systems offer potential to transform these spaces, providing adaptable, sensory-inclusive experiences. However, the design space for environment-based interventions in dental settings remains largely unexplored. To address this, we conducted in-depth 2-hour co-design sessions with 13 neurodivergent participants to explore environment-based strategies to meet diverse sensory needs. We identified five core design goals for inclusive dental environments: experience transformation, distraction, exposure management, restoration, and social facilitation. Our technology-agnostic design catalogue can inform multiple implementation approaches, including projection mapping, ambient displays, and responsive physical elements. We contribute design patterns for interactive environmental systems, methodological insights for participatory design with neurodivergent communities, and demonstrate how tangible materials serve as proxies for environmental interventions, with implications for Augmented Reality system design. This study advances inclusive design practices and highlights co-designing with neurodivergent individuals.

Eye contact between strangers, even fleeting, can spark interaction and foster connection, happiness, and belonging. Yet in public spaces, such encounters are often suppressed by “civil inattention,” with many people absorbed in their phones. We explore how reconfiguring the ambient environment with MirrorBot, a mobile robot with adaptive mirrors, can encourage social encounters by subtly redirecting glances. By shifting reflections between self- and mutual recognition, MirrorBot invites serendipitous eye contact, shared awareness, and low-stakes engagement. In a controlled 2×2 between-subjects study with 90 participants (45 dyads) across four conditions (MirrorBot, Bot-only, Mirror-only, and Control), we found that MirrorBot led participants to initiate conversation more often, feel greater closeness and togetherness, and have more enjoyable interactions. Our findings position robots not only as social agents but as socio-spatial interfaces that choreograph sight lines and shared attention in physical space, opening new possibilities for technologies that cultivate human connection in public life.

Brief eye contact with strangers can foster connection, belonging, and positive affect, yet such moments are often scarce in public spaces. This paper investigates how a spatially situated robot can reshape the visual field of a shared space to influence how strangers notice and respond to one another. We present MirrorBot, a mobile robot equipped with two actuated mirrors that dynamically redirect reflections to reshape sightlines between people. In a study with 32 strangers in 16 pairs in a waiting-room setting, MirrorBot elicited patterns such as low-stakes icebreaking, nonverbal synchrony, joint sensemaking, asymmetric engagement, and avoidance. Participants also attributed multiple roles to the robot, such as mediator, observer, magnifier, or disrupter, revealing that its social meaning was fluid and co-constructed. Our work extends HRI by showing that robots can act not only as conversational partners but also as spatial mediators, curating opportunities for human–human connection through the reconfiguration of spatial relationships

This paper presents Light Everywhere, a robotic lighting system that enhances flexibility in domestic spaces by traversing walls and ceilings to provide real-time, task-based illumination. We report a field investigation, an online study, and a between-subjects experiment (N=26) using the WoZ approach comparing Light Everywhere with a conventional desk lamp, evaluating perceived comfort, control, and spatial utilization. Results show the robot supports adaptive behaviors and dynamic space usage. Findings highlight the potential of robotic lighting to redefine housing flexibility and user-driven environmental control, "shedding light" on a novel HRI and smart home design.

While robots are traditionally envisioned as physical entities that move through, sense, and act upon the environment, a new category is emerging: the inhabitable robot, or "robot-room," which redefines human-robot interaction by immersing us within the robot itself. As a first step in exploring this novel design space, we developed a full-scale, rapid-prototyped robot-room—not a simulation or scale model—and conducted a co-design study with 30 participants. Inside this immersive space, participants explored new forms of human-robot interaction, engaging their perceptual faculties for "knowing spaces." Our findings inform our ongoing development of a fully operational robot-room and offer valuable insights into expanding the concept of human-robot interaction to one of human-robot cohabitation.

We explore speculation ("wondering about how things could be") as a pedagogical tool for teaching HRI. We focus on the potential of speculation to create spaces for discussion and debate on future HRI scenarios. Drawing particularly on dystopian fiction, students are encouraged to imagine human-robot interactions that offer alternative, "possible futures" in response to the negative consequences of technology. This approach challenges traditional user-centered design by guiding students to prototype complex HRI systems. To illustrate this, we introduce the motivations for and the process of our approach and present case studies from our own course delivery. While our case study centers on designing robotic environments–an emerging subfield of HRI–we see the approach as broadly applicable to the design of social robots and other embodied forms of robotics.

Central to the human experience is establishing a connection with individuals who are unfamiliar with one another—strangers. We describe results from a field study that deployed SocialStools , a socio-spatial interface with mixed-reality experience, to support ice-breaking between strangers in a public space. Synthesizing existing social psychology theories, we propose a human behavior framework with distinct, interconnected behavioral components, and then apply this framework as an instrument to analyze the “ice-breaking” process amongst 81 strangers assigned to 27 groups using SocialStools . Our analysis identifies recurring behavioral patterns that demonstrate the fluid and emergent nature of interpersonal spatial adjustments, emphasizing the dynamic aspects of proxemics. Our contributions are the results of our empirical field study with a socio-spatial interface that advances our understanding of how strangers interact when uninstructed, and a theory-based, behavioral framework—an analytical instrument to examine the dynamic experience of ice-breaking.

We report on the effects of a novel soft robot of our design on emotional wellbeing. Participants (N=94) engaged with our soft robotic surface designed to simulate the benefits of nature and provide a therapeutic behavioral intervention. The study assessed group differences in attention, perceived restorativeness, and self-reported stress between three groups: a group that performed a breathing exercise with the robot, a group that watched the robot perform an ocean-inspired movement designed to capture involuntary attention, and a control where the robot was static. The Breathing Group had a significant reduction in self-reported stress compared to the Control Group. Significant differences in attention and perceived restoration were not found. Qualitative feedback suggested the robot did provide a positive distraction in the environment and participants were generally favorable to the robot, characterizing it as soothing and fascinating. Feedback on the sensory qualities showed that people who did not initially enjoy the texture or sound often acclimated to the novelty of the surface with improved perceptions over time. These findings suggest the promise of soft robots to support mental wellbeing.

We propose, examine prototypes of, and collect user input on morphing robotic surfaces, "robot-room" elements that, individually or in combination, change the functionality of the rooms we live in, directly controlled by the room’s occupants engaging with it. Robot-rooms represent an advance in human-robot interaction whereby human interaction is within a machine that physically envelops us. We discuss the motivation for such robot-rooms, present initial work aimed at their physical realization, and report on a user study of 80 participants to learn what people might want of and expect from robot rooms, the results of which will inform both the iterative design of the robot room and the thinking of our community as it grapples with how we want to live with (and "in") robots.

Parental estrangement can cause long-term harm to socio-emotional skills, mental health and wellbeing. This is pronounced for children who experienced trauma. "Robo-Therapists" have been used to train children to express emotions, but such robots are often "human replacements" and tend to be too costly to deploy widely. We propose e-MoBo, a low-cost, non-humanoid "Robo-Mediator" of our own design to train children’s socio-emotional skills towards creating stronger relationships with others. We report on the developing e-MoBo and results of a field study with the current prototype and 14 neurotypical children, ages 5-9, as we prepare to deploy e-MoBo in a residential center with traumatized children. Our results suggest that e-MoBo, compared to a control, helps children express emotions, offering the promise of a low-cost, non-anthropomorphic, Robo-Mediator meeting children’s needs.

Children who live in out-of-home, residential care facilities have typically experienced adversity and trauma and consequentially exhibit psychological distress (e.g., despair, detachment). Residential care facilities are understaffed while needing to establish a healthy liaison between staff and children. This lamentable state of affairs has become more pressing following the Covid-19 pandemic. With expertise in design, robotics, interaction design, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and early childhood education, our research team has designed three early robotic prototypes that we call “e,” “Mo," and “Bo,” in our longer design endeavor to develop “eMoBo,” an interactive, non-humanoid robot for young children living in residential care facilities to playfully express themselves. The aim of this child-centered project is to provide the opportunity for children who have experienced hostile environments and inappropriate care to become aware of, regulate, and express their inner socio-emotional world via tactile and visual experimentation with eMoBo so that they might more easily communicate their feelings and needs with non-biological caregivers, striving for a significant, long-standing improvement in the wellbeing of these children. In this paper, we present our designs and envision their use in two use cases. The three prototypes will be shared with our research partners, the Hillside Residential Center (Rochester, New York) towards advancing the design of eMoBo with the Center's stakeholders.

We are developing soft robotic surfaces to support emotional wellbeing for people with limited access to nature. This work explores how biophilic design (based on the theory that humans have an evolutionary desire to connect with nature) can be applied to interactive systems. We describe a generative design tool that produces a bio-inspired digital prototype of a soft robotic surface. In our workflow, participants walked outdoors to photograph natural features in their environment. The photographs are used to generate a set of corresponding designs. As early validation, we conducted a small user study to test the robustness of our tool with different photographic inputs. We also collected feedback on how the workflow influenced participants’ perceptions of the design outcomes. The results guided the fabrication of a new physical prototype and demonstrated the utility of our approach, which aims to inform the design of future biophilic cyber-physical systems.

Interacting with strangers can be beneficial but also challenging. Fortunately, these challenges can lead to design opportunities. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a socio-spatial interface, SocialStools, that leverages the human propensity for embodied interaction to foster togetherness between strangers. SocialStools is an installation of three responsive stools on caster wheels that generate sound and imagery in the near environment as three strangers sit on them, move them, and rotate them relative to each other. In our study with 12 groups of three strangers, we found a sense of togetherness emerged through interaction, evidenced by different patterns of socio-spatial movements, verbal communication, non-verbal behavior, and interview responses. We present our findings, articulate reasons for the cultivation of togetherness, consider the unique social affordances of our spatial interface in shifting attention during interpersonal communication, and provide design implications. This research contributes insights toward designing cyber-physical interfaces that foster interaction and togetherness among strangers at a time when cultivating togetherness is especially critical.

Mobile robots can provide unique and engaging experiences for child-robot gameplay, but are often overlooked due to challenges of setup, navigation, and space limitations. To combat these challenges, we designed “Sapling and the Travelling Forest,” a small mobile robot that uses a table-top game platform to play games with children. The system was designed as a low-cost and travel friendly alternative to larger mobile robot setups, and can be used in any location with a power outlet. The robot, “Sapling,” is an interactive agent that moves through the “Travelling Forest” platform which frames the system and contains the robot to the forest play area. The system currently offers three games focused on collaborative, spatial play. Radio frequency identification (RFID) enabled games allow Sapling to meaningfully interact with both the game elements and a child. In this paper, we present the technical design of the robot and its small, table-top platform, as well as the game design process for the three board games. The presented system is a convenient way to conduct single or multi-session child-robot interaction studies with mobile robots.

Robots are typically designed as occupants of rooms, adapting to, and navigating within them. “Robot surfaces,” an emerging robot typology, are not occupants of but integral with rooms, physically shaping rooms to support human activity. We report on an advancement of robot surfaces formed by weaving McKibben Pneumatic Air Muscles that, when actuated, morph a 2D planar surface to generate 3D geometries including a “spherical cap.” Following our foundational study at different scales with different materials, we developed a full-scale prototype that offers an intimate and private space for people meeting in open plan environments. We report on our research, focusing on a design case, and validate the full-scale prototype as compared to our Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) model for three useful configurations. Our quantitative and qualitative results suggest that our robot surface can support human activity as envisioned. This research contributes foundational understanding of an emerging category of robotics from which our team and peers can build.

Architecture has long been conceptualized as “a machine for living in” and more recently as “a robot for living in.” Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has developed robots as social agents—our friends, companions, and partners. Could robotic environments be perceived and interacted with as socially intelligent agents? If so, how should we design a Socially Interactive, Robotic Environment (SIRE)? To address the first question, we offer the empirical evidence and theoretical support of SIREs. We then address the second question by discussing the “Spatial Design” and “Interaction Design” of SIREs through an explorative, pattern-based approach. For “Spatial Design,” we present a co-design study for a partner-like office, generating new spatial patterns that form pattern languages to convey sociality to individual users. For “Interaction Design,” we employed four “Design Patterns for Sociality in HRI.” Our results show that “Spatial Patterns” and “HRI Patterns” can be integrated as one pattern language for sociality and that such a pattern language can vary from person to person. Through the explorative works of this paper, we wish to introduce SIRE to IE communities and cultivate the conversation about the design and application of SIREs in everyday life.

It is well understood that nature has a calming effect on us. But in a physical space remote from nature, might the robotic embodiment of a natural phenomenon have the same effect? To address this question, we have simulated the soothing movement of ocean waves in a soft robotic surface, both as a simulation and in a physical prototype. In this paper, we report on our modeling methods of this natural phenomenon, we present the application of a selected model to both a simulation of the predicted inflation pattern of the soft robot surface and to the physical soft robot surface, and we compare the behavior of the physical robot to our simulation as a means to validate our design. We observed that the prototype’s frequency spectrum successfully shared the general trend and shape as our mathematical model. This research introduces a novel robot for a novel application: a soft robot to promote restoration and help regulate mental wellbeing in tight physical confines.

We introduce a robotic appendage (a "fin") for a non-humanoid mobile robot that can communicate affect to child collaborators. Affective configurations were generated from a collection of cartoon images that featured characters with floppy or bunny ears. These images were classified according to the six Ekman emotions, analyzed to create ideal emotion configurations, and validated with a user study. From these configurations, we designed multiple continuum robot fin appendages and evaluated them based on (a) their ability to achieve the generated affect configurations, and (b) their durability for sustained use in child-robot interaction studies.

Pandemic or not, many of us are spending more time indoors, apart from others and from nature. We report on user perceptions of "pheB," a non-anthropomorphic, bio-inspired, pneumatic-actuated robot surface aiming to help regulate our emotional states when inhabiting confined spaces, such as our homes. A survey (N = 50) tested perceived stress levels before and after performing guided breathing exercises under two conditions: led by the pheB prototype and a 2D vector graphic. We learned that perceived stress levels were significantly lower after performing the pheB led exercises. Comments from respondents who did not prefer pheB suggested a possible "Uncanny Valley" effect. The same survey elicited feedback on possible design features for pheB related to color, scale, orientation, and edge complexity. Beyond reporting on a soft robotic artifact of our own design, the research reported here offers an exemplar for conducting user studies online of novel robot designs, highlights user perceptions of bio-inspired robots in HRI research and considers biophilia and the uncanny valley for non-anthropomorphic robots supporting human-centered design applications.

There has been increased development of assistive robots for the home, along with empirical studies assessing cultural differences on user perception. However, little attention has been paid to cultural differences with respect to non- humanoid, multi-robot interactions in homes or otherwise. In this exploratory paper, we investigate how cultural differences may impact users’ preferences and perceived usefulness of a multi-robot system by creating an interactive online survey and considering variables often absent in HRI studies. We introduce our multi-robot design and survey construction, and report results evaluated across 191 young adult participants from China, India, and the USA. We find significant effects of culture on both participants’ preferences and perceived usefulness of the system between India and China or the USA, but not between China and the USA. We also find effects of culture on perceived usefulness to be partially mediated by participant preferences. Our findings reinforce the importance of considering cultural differences in designing domestic multi-robotic assistants.

“pheB,” is a robotic “plant-human, embodied, biofeedback” system to support the wellbeing of human inhabitants in confined, physical spaces. This surface aims to increase users’ emotion regulation and foster connections with nature by visualizing the internal states of plants through tactile, expressive movement. Unlike 2D biofeedback visualization models currently in use, our research explores mindfulness practices through immersive, tangible interactions to increase therapeutic effectiveness. This pictorial traces the development of our design (to-date) and presents results from an early user study conducted to (a) assess the prototype at leading breathing exercises, (b) evaluate preferences for different design features, and (c) refine the design of a questionnaire for future user testing. Findings suggest pheB was perceived positively and as an embodied extension of self during guided breathing exercises. This work contributes knowledge toward developing novel biofeedback modalities and offers a design exemplar for interactive artifacts that nurture meaningful relationships with nature.

In child-robot collaborations, a robot may fail to accomplish its part of a task. In this situation, the robot is reliant on the child to recover. Inherently prosocial, a child is inclined to help the robot collaborator if the child can properly identify the robot failure and infer how to help correct it. In this study, we investigate how a non-humanoid robot can solicit the help of a child-collaborator using only its motion path. We conducted a study with twenty-two children, ages 3-7, who participated in a collaborative building task with a non-humanoid mobile robot. We found that autonomous motion of a non-humanoid robot elicited prosocial behavior from 59% of children, and that young children were willing to engage with the robot as an animate partner despite its limited capabilities and form. This finding has implications for robot design striving to encourage prosocial behavior in children of different ages.

Novel, "space-making" robots have potential to redefine physical space and the human activities occurring in it. Categorically distinct from many robots and far removed from humanoids, space-making robots are not objects in space, not anthropomorphic, not animal-like, not mobile, but instead, integral with the physical environment, embedded in or forming walls, ceilings, floors, partitions, vehicle interiors, and building envelopes. Given their distinctiveness, space-making robots offer a novel human-machine interaction. This paper investigates whether users perceive space-making robots as agents- artificial social actors characterized by the capacity for intelligence, recognition, and intention. Results of an in-lab experiment with 11 participants and an online, between-group experiment with 120 participants show that people attribute agency metrics of intelligence, intention, recognition, cooperation, collaboration, friendliness, and welcome to our reconfigurable robotic surface embedded in a wall partition. While space-making robots may become numerous in the built environment, our results are significant, moreover, for their broader implications for conceptualizing and designing human-machine interactions.

Developments of robot arms are countless, but there has been little focus on robot surfaces for the reshaping of a habitable space—especially compliant surfaces. In this paper we introduce a novel, tendon-driven, robot surface comprised of aggregated, overlapping panels organized in a herringbone pattern. The individual 3D-printed panels and their behavior as an aggregation are inspired by the form and behavior of a pinecone. This paper presents our concept, design, and realization of this robot, and compares our prototype to simulations of four physical configurations that are formally distinct and suggestive of how the surface might be applied to habitable, physical space in response to human needs and wants. For the four configurations studied, we found a validating match between prototype and simulations. The paper concludes with a consideration of potential applications for robot surfaces like this one.

We discuss motion planning in the configuration spaces of robots containing continuum elements. The configuration space structure of extensible continuum sections is first analyzed, with practical constraints unique to continuum elements identified. The results are applied to generate the configuration space of a hybrid continuum lamp/mobile base robot. A conventional motion planning RRT/A* approach is subsequently applied for the robot in an aging in place application scenario.

The inspiration for designing tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction can come from stranger places than needs assessments and observations. In conceptualizing home+, a pair of interactive furnishings enabling independent living, our design-research team found inspiration in modern painting and contemporary dance. Giorgio de Chirico's painting "Furniture in the Valley" (1928) captures the curious vitality and intermingling of furniture outside their normal confines that our team translated into this active pair of home+ robots and their intimate rapport. Two contemporary dance works, Andrea Miller's "(C)arbon" and Ohad Naharin's "STOP," explore the interrelationships of three bodies, coping with their circumstances, which inspired the interoperability and control strategies across the pair of robots and a human "in-the-loop." This paper aims to inspire other design researchers to seek, in strange places, inspirations for tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction.

Communication theory suggests that people tend to interact with interactive artifacts as if these were human. For decades, this understanding has been applied to designing singular, embedded artifacts at a small physical scale. In this paper, we extend the same theory and practice to the dimension of space-to designing interactive, physical environments and their components. A conceptual ground for this is found in a "pattern language" developed by Alexander et al. for designing static physical environments. Upon this ground, we construct a systematic framework for designing "collaborative environments" shaped, as well, by our own concepts, Direct Mapping, Conveyed Mapping, and Space Agency, to strive for more human-human-like interactions between human beings and their physical surroundings. Our lab-based study generates a hypothetical design as qualitative validation of the framework, which has significance for designing tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction as it extends, inevitably, to the dimension of space, entertaining, serving, and augmenting us.

Illiteracy is a global problem impacting the growth and development of individuals and society. Studies indicate that picturebook reading within a facilitated storytime setting is an important tool for children's language acquisition. In the research reported here, we hypothesized that literacy, in an increasingly digital society, can be cultivated in a robot-embedded environment that is physical, digital and evocative of the picturebook being read. Words become worlds. To test our hypothesis, we designed, prototyped, and implemented the LIT ROOM, a cyber-physical room for literacy. As a Research through Design [RtD] exemplar for interactive systems at habitable scale, the LIT ROOM featured a multi-phase, iterative process of design and evaluation for usability and efficacy. Evaluations with 35 children and 6 librarians in a public library serving a population with grave literacy challenges suggest that our reconfigurable learning environment facilitates a diversity of children's literary responses during the dialogical reading of picturebooks.

The outcome of a multidisciplinary and iterative process, CyberPLAYce is a tangible, interactive, cyber-physical learning tool for children supporting computational thinking and, particularly, playful storytelling. CyberPLAYce finds inspiration in the concept of child-computer interaction, where meaning is constructed through spatially reconfiguring the physical environment. The novel aspect of CyberPLAYce is its extension of cyber-learning to the dimension of space where children construct meaning at a larger physical scale. This paper outlines the motivations for CyberPLAYce, focuses on the full arc of design and evaluation activities concerning computational thinking (CT) practices that engaged 8-12-year-old storytellers, and concludes with a consideration of future work focusing on spatial thinking with CyberPLAYce. Results from our empirical study suggest that cyber-physical play afforded by CyberPLAYce scaffolds computational thinking, creating, and sharing in children. Particularly for IDC researchers in the educational domain, CyberPLAYce represents a Research-through-design exemplar supporting children's enjoyment of learning and meaning-construction.

As we come to live, work and play in an increasingly digital society, the future of interactive systems research, design, and practice will be shaped partly by larger-scale, cyber-physical systems. The cyber-physical LIT KIT enhances children's picturebook reading, both during and after interactive read-alouds, creating a multi-media, mixed-reality experience that transforms everyday environments into an environment evocative of the picturebook being read. The room-filled audio-visual-spatial effects of the LIT KIT contextualize language and provide feedback to the participants. The LIT KIT also acts as a story-extension tool, allowing children to customize environmental effects towards interpreting picturebooks for themselves. This paper offers a scenario of the child-computer interaction afforded by the LIT KIT, elucidates the motivations for its design, and focuses on an evaluation activity and its results. Particularly for DIS researchers in the educational domain, the LIT KIT represents a design exemplar that supports children's enjoyment of learning and meaning-making.

An inevitable new frontier for the CHI community is the development of complex, larger-scale, cyber-physical artifacts where advancements in design, computing and robotics converge. Presented here is a design exemplar: the Assistive, Robotic Table (ART), the key component of our envisioned home suite of networked, robotic furnishings for hospitals and homes, promoting wellbeing and independent living. We begin with the motivations for ART, and present our iterative, five-phase, participatory design-and-evaluation process involving clinicians at a rehabilitation hospital, focusing here on the final usability study. From our wide-ranging design-research activities, which may be characterized as research through design, we found ART to be promising but also challenging. As a design exemplar, ART offers invaluable lessons to the CHI community as it comes to design larger-scale, cyber-physical artifacts cultivating interactions across people and their surroundings that define places of social, cultural and psychological significance.

Recognition of human gestures is an active area of research integral for the development of intuitive human-machine interfaces for ubiquitous computing and assistive robotics. In particular, such systems are key to effective environmental designs that facilitate aging in place. Typically, gesture recognition takes the form of template matching in which the human participant is expected to emulate a choreographed motion as prescribed by the researchers. A corresponding robotic action is then a one-to-one mapping of the template classification to a library of distinct responses. In this paper, we explore a recognition scheme based on the growing neural gas (GNG) algorithm that places no initial constraints on the user to perform gestures in a specific way. Motion descriptors extracted from sequential skeletal depth data are clustered by GNG and mapped directly to a robotic response that is refined through reinforcement learning. A simple good/bad reward signal is provided by the user. This paper presents results that show that the topology-preserving quality of GNG allows generalization between gestured commands. Experimental results using an automated reward are presented that compare learning results involving single nodes versus results involving the influence of node neighborhoods. Although separability of input data influences the speed of learning convergence for a given neighborhood radius, it is shown that learning progresses toward emulation of an associative memory that maps input gesture to desired action.

Illiteracy is a global problem that impacts societal and economic growth and development, and is directly correlated with the financial success, health and overall well-being of individuals. Studies indicate that picture-book reading within a facilitated story-time setting is an important tool for language acquisition in children. The proposed research hypothesizes that in an increasingly digital society, literacy can be cultivated in a robot-embedded environment that is, at once, physical, digital and evocative of the picture-book being read. Inspired by concepts of embodied interaction, the research team proposes the design, implementation and evaluation of an intelligent, fine-tunable suite of architectural-robotic artifacts -- the LIT ROOM - distributed at room-scale in a public library setting. Through a reconfigurable, co-adaptive learning environment, the LIT ROOM aims to augment the dialogical reading of picture-books within an engaging and exploratory space for the advancement of literacy and learning.

The outcome of a multidisciplinary and iterative process, the LIT KIT is a portable, cyber-physical artifact supporting children's picture-book reading. The LIT KIT follows from the hypothesis that children's literacy can be advanced in a tangible, co-creative environment that is both physical and digital. The LIT KIT employs color, sound and movement to scaffold meaning-making through the creation of an environment that is evocative of the picture-book being read. Designed with a Sifteo™ cube [16] interface, the LIT KIT creates room-scaled audio-visual and spatial effects to both contextualize language and provide feedback during dialogical interactions between a child and an adult reader. Children can customize the LIT KIT settings to actively interpret the ideas, concepts and environments inherent in the picture-book's words and images. The LIT KIT is an outreach component, for home or classroom use, of our developing room-scaled LIT ROOM for a major public library. Presented here are motivations for the LIT KIT, and an elaboration of its design and development. Usability evaluations have begun and continue, as we further the prototype with expected completion in Summer 2013.

Illiteracy is a global problem that impacts societal and economic growth and development, and is directly correlated with the financial success, health and overall well-being of individuals. Studies indicate that picture-book reading within a facilitated story-time setting is an important tool for language acquisition in children. We hypothesize that in an increasingly digital society, literacy can be cultivated in a robot-embedded environment that is, at once, physical, digital and evocative of the picture-book being read. Inspired by concepts of embodied interaction, our developing LIT ROOM is an intelligent, fine-tunable suite of architectural-robotic artifacts distributed at room-scale in a public library setting. Presented here are motivations for and design overview of this developing interactive artifact. Through a reconfigurable, co-adaptive learning environment, the LIT ROOM aims to augment the dialogical reading of picture-books within an engaging and exploratory space for the advancement of literacy and learning.

In this paper, we consider the modeling of robotic continuous “continuum” two-dimensional surfaces. We discuss the fundamental differences between such robot surfaces and traditional rigid link and continuum robots. We then introduce new kinematic models for continuum robotic surfaces. We compare the kinematic models to physical continuum surfaces and validate their performance.

Healthcare is becoming more digital and technological, but healthcare environments have not yet become embedded with digital technologies to support the most productive (physical) interaction between medical patients, clinical staff and the physical artifacts that surround and envelop them. This shortcoming is an opportunity for the architecture and robotics communities to interface with each other and the everyday users of healthcare environments. Our extended lab focused ten weeks on sketching in hardware a robotic, patient-room ecosystem we call home+ with the help of clinicians at the Roger C. Peace Rehabilitation Hospital of the Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center [GHS]. This early prototyping effort represents our vision for the larger robotic patient room, and identifies opportunities for more focused work on an Assistive Robotic Table (ART).

Our world is digital, physical, social and technological. Informal learning environments that are likewise digital, physical, social and technological have the potential to afford children with creative, informal learning explorations. Following from Antle's concept of "embodied child-computer interaction" and Vygotsky's "cycle of creative imagination," we demonstrate an intelligent, robotic informal learning environment at room-scale targeted for K-3 visitors to a regional children's museum. Our reconfigurable environment is, in essence, co-adaptive, allowing the physical learning environment and young students to mutually change and develop through iterative interactions.

We discuss disciplinary barriers which have traditionally prevented robotics from significantly impacting the built (architectural) environment we inhabit. Specifically, we describe the implementation of, and lessons learned from, a multidisciplinary graduate-level course in Architectural Robotics. The results from class interactions and projects provide insight into novel ways in which robotics expertise can be effectively leveraged in architecture. Conversely, our outcomes suggest ways in which the knowledge and perspective of architects could stimulate significant innovations in robotics.

Intelligent Systems can effectively bridge the wondrous world of childhood and the adult world of rules, goals and expectations. This paper explores the possibility of an embodied child-computer interaction that cultivates creativity - a core value of the successful adult in an increasingly digital society. We draw specifically on the Reggio Emilia method of education, not by adding to it PCs (as has been done, with mixed results), but instead, by respecting its focus on haptics - on the handling of physical things as a way of learning - embedding computation in the very fabric of the physical environment. We call this embodied system a Creativity Support Environment to emphasize the role of the physical environment as, itself, a "teacher" of creativity.

While high-technology has become pervasive in hospitals, domestic environments remain essentially low-tech and conventional, despite the care needs of an aging population wishing to age in place. In response, an interdisciplinary team - robotics engineer, architect, human factors psychologist and gerontologist - are designing, constructing, field testing, and evaluating comforTABLE, an intelligent environment for aging in place. comforTABLE is designed to increase the quality of life of both healthy individuals as well as persons with impaired mobility by intelligently supporting the physical organization of their immediate environment. While comforTABLE features intelligent behavior and robotic elements, comforTABLE aims to help people do things for themselves. This paper introduces the motivations for comforTABLE, presents its three intelligent, networked components and describes scenarios of how the system might operate in domestic situations.

“AWE” is a programmable “Animated Work Environment” supporting everyday human activities, at home, work and school, in an increasingly digital society. AWE features a novel robotic “wall,” three horizontal, reconfigurable work surfaces, and embedded information technologies. The video shows AWE as a digital simulation moving through six standard wall-desk configurations, interspersed with still photos and video clips of people interacting with the physical, full-scale, working prototype. The video also shows AWE beginning to behave intelligently as well as users fine-tuning AWE's configurations by gesturing proximity sensors mounted at the hinges between wall panels. Usability testing suggests that AWE clearly adapts to variations in complex activities involving users working or playing in a single physical space with both physical and digital tools and artifacts.