Designing Unique Emotions for Autonomous Delivery Robots
Melek Akan (TU Delft - Industrial Design Engineering)
P.P.M. Hekkert – Mentor (TU Delft - Form and Experience)
J.H. Vroon – Graduation committee member (Internet of Things)
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Abstract
Robotic delivery services can provide contactless delivery, a highly sought-after service under mandates of social distancing since the coronavirus pandemic has arisen. With the rise of autonomous delivery robots, humans' and robots' collaborative existence has become a crucial topic to be discussed. This graduation project aimed to explore the autonomous delivery robots' specific perception of the world through various factors: their purpose, intent, state, mood, personality, attention, responsiveness, intelligence, and capabilities, and through this understanding, design unique robot emotions that will foster them to communicate their unique needs. Since autonomous delivery robots have different concerns than people, they require different emotions. A speculative design approach has been utilised for this project. Speculative design serves two distinct purposes: it enables us to think about the future and critique current practice. It is based on imagination, imagining other worlds and alternatives, creating provocations, and raising questions, innovations, and explorations.
Throughout this project, several exploratory research methods were conducted to understand the delivery robots' worldview. Following, four unique robot emotions have been created. These emotions aim to serve particular concerns of the delivery robots on sidewalks. The proposed four unique emotions are called Donsul, Trittity, Loniformi and Puffalope. An online survey was conducted to examine whether people could distinguish these unique robot emotions from human emotions. The survey results show that people assumed that the robot is more likely to experience emotion when it experiences an adverse event, such as a barrier to executing its task. The project's value is not what it achieves or does but what it is and how it makes people feel, especially if it encourages people to question everydayness in an imaginative, troubling, and thoughtful way and how things could be different.