Puffy is a learning and playful robotic companion for pre-school children. Designed in cooperation with a team of educators and inspired by Disney's Baymax, Puffy has a combination of features which makes it unique with respect to existing robots used in educational contexts. It is mobile and has an egg-shaped inflatable and soft body; it supports multimodal interaction, reacting to children's gestures and movements, facial expressions and emotions, and communicates using voice, lights, movements in space, and inside-out projections on its body. The paper describes the design of Puffy and discusses an exploratory study that has involved 79 children aged 4-5 at a local pre-school to investigate the Likeability of the robot and how much children enjoyed, engaged to and remembered some specific design features and play activities.

Degiorgi, M., Garzotto, F., Gelsomini, M., Leonardi, G., Penati, S., Ramuzat, N., et al. (2017). Puffy - An inflatable robotic companion for pre-schoolers. In RO-MAN 2017 - 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (pp.35-41). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. [10.1109/ROMAN.2017.8172277].

Puffy - An inflatable robotic companion for pre-schoolers

Garzotto F.;
2017

Abstract

Puffy is a learning and playful robotic companion for pre-school children. Designed in cooperation with a team of educators and inspired by Disney's Baymax, Puffy has a combination of features which makes it unique with respect to existing robots used in educational contexts. It is mobile and has an egg-shaped inflatable and soft body; it supports multimodal interaction, reacting to children's gestures and movements, facial expressions and emotions, and communicates using voice, lights, movements in space, and inside-out projections on its body. The paper describes the design of Puffy and discusses an exploratory study that has involved 79 children aged 4-5 at a local pre-school to investigate the Likeability of the robot and how much children enjoyed, engaged to and remembered some specific design features and play activities.
paper
Robotics; Robots
English
26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2017 - 28 August 2017 - 01 September 2017
2017
RO-MAN 2017 - 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication
9781538635186
2017
2017-January
35
41
none
Degiorgi, M., Garzotto, F., Gelsomini, M., Leonardi, G., Penati, S., Ramuzat, N., et al. (2017). Puffy - An inflatable robotic companion for pre-schoolers. In RO-MAN 2017 - 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (pp.35-41). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. [10.1109/ROMAN.2017.8172277].
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10281/561139
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