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?

• Flowchart, cognitive walkthrough, cards, board, software (ARC) — recipes
• Given that your phone/laptop have so many capabilities already — how to connect/interface this to motion and embodiment?
• How do you make ChatGPT-4o move a servo?
• Can you prompt ChatGPT to converse in a certain tone of voice, with predefined (bound) knowledge?

Project Notes

Technical Plan

• Use borrowed Bluetooth Xbox controller for steering/moving the wheels
• Use the MIRO app to move the robot’s additional features (ears, eyes, etc.)
• Puppeteer the robot expression/scenario
• Decide when and why to move: wheels, eyes, ears, tail, head up/down, head left/right
• Other: sounds, lights, …

Design Tool Ideas

MakeYourOwnStoryboard

A storyboarding tool tailored to robot behaviour design.

Cards Against Humanities — Deck of Prompt Cards

Goal: Finding out robot hardware capabilities and exploring scenarios for robot behaviour.

CardsAgainstRobots

A game you play with multiple people where the goal is to find out the robot’s capabilities and explore topics related to the robot’s “job” (scenarios).

The robot in question might not have the capability to do what you want it to do, or functionality might not be appropriate to the use case. This step ensures that these are aligned. You also explore the different scenarios (and thus its behaviour) through using different types of cards: emotion cards, actuation cards, and wildcards.

In each step, the players pick one card of each to play out the scenario/behaviour. The first and second cards are randomly selected from the corresponding card piles. When the cards have been selected, the humans act out the scenario and puppeteer the robot and the ways the scenario could play out with different robot interactions — either through physical puppeteering or through the use of a controller.

Scenario Card Examples

Card Types

Evaluation

To be added here:

• An evaluation of our methodology applied with the Miro-E robot.

This was done with:

• Liz van Ginderen (s27349745)
• Anna Hornman (s3056600)
• Oyindrila Sen Gupta (s3697762)
• Sarah Mans (s2306379)