More recently, consumer electronics companies have also started to explore expressive social robots as commercial products. Some of these robots use facial expressions while others express their internal states through bodily gestures or other modalities. Researchers in HRI have been developing robots with expressive behaviors and collecting empirical evidence for the effects of these behaviors.

The design of social robots with expressive capabilities is an active area of research in human-robot interaction (HRI). This article details the implementation of Blossom's design and demonstrates the platform's potential through four field deployment case studies. The result is an accessible and customizable social robot for researchers. All elements in the design were conceived with a low barrier-of-entry in mind. Blossom's smartphone-based gesture generation requires neither programming nor character animation experience, allowing lay users to create their own behaviors. Smooth organic movements are achieved with tensile mechanisms, elastic components, and a soft exterior cover attached loosely to the body. Blossom's appearance is open-ended through handcrafted fabric exteriors created and customized by users. The robot's mechanism can be quickly assembled and partially extended by end-users.

Addressing these challenges, Blossom aims at three design objectives: accessibility, flexibility, and expressiveness. Blossom is an open-source social robotics platform responding to three challenges in human-robot interaction (HRI) research: (1) Designing, manufacturing, and programming social robots requires a high level of technical knowledge (2) social robot designs are fixed in appearance and movement capabilities, making them hard to adapt to a specific application and (3) the use of rigid mechanisms and hard outer shells limits the robots’ expressive capabilities.

Blossom for r mac os x