Social Robot Design

This post combines sessions 7 and 8 of my course on Social Robot Design (2025/2026) into one write-up, structured around the in-depth tool design assignment. In-Depth Tool Design: CardsAgainstRobots 8.1 Motivated direction choice We chose scenario design, in the form of a card-based improvisation game called CardsAgainstRobots. Our case is about supporting student mental wellbeing with the Miro-E robot. Splitting actions into human cards, robot cards, and wildcards let us combine and recombine many small human-robot scenarios quickly, without writing out full interactions by hand, and gave the whole team a shared, playful way to explore ideas together instead of one person proposing suggestions alone. ...

This is the result of session 8 in my course on Social Robot Design (2025/2026). The content of this session was mainly about putting everything of the game together. We thought of the cards, how they would look etc. How we can make our booklet and poster. And also the video. Over the next few weeks we actually printed and made everything. Session 8 Planning the deliverables Before session 8, we had already puppeteered Miro and written step-by-step guidelines for puppetering. This session was about turning that work into three deliverables: a booklet, a poster, and a video. ...

This is the result of session 6 in my course on Social Robot Design (2025/2026). The content of this session was mainly about designing a design tool to prototype the behavior of the robot, and also evaluate it on the robot itself. Assignment: Design Behaviour Design Tools Question to be answered What can help you as a designer prototype (high level) robot behaviour? Especially tools that do not rely on a Wizard of Oz approach are welcome — or think of interesting hybrids. What could help you prototype and test? ...

This is the result of session 4 in my course on Social Robot Design (2025/2026). The content of this session was mainly about the different types of embodiment that robots can have, what embodiments are used in social robot research, and how we can design a tool and think about how to design embodiments. This was done with: Liz van Ginderen (s27349745) Anna Hornman (s3056600) Oyindrila Sen Gupta (s3697762) Sarah Mans (s2306379) Social Robotics: Embodiment, Design, and Prototyping Tools 1. State of the Art in Social Robot Research You might have been considering a number of application areas for social robotics since the start of this course. We have shown examples in education, healthcare, the hospitality sector, etc. Very often research (or simple experiments in the wild) are carried out by hardware that happens to be available, rather than hardware that is specifically designed for a purpose (hence you see research with Pepper the librarian, Pepper the trainer and Pepper the educator). ...

This is the result of session 5 in my course on Social Robot Design (2025/2026). The content of this session was mainly about the ethical aspects about robotics. In the lecture we played out several plays (LARPs). The first one was about an app that could predict your life expectancy, but it was paid and promoted inequality. We were asked to play out the roles where each of us got a different role (having the app, and not having the app). ...