GoBot: Modular Hardware, Variable Autonomy, Highly Engaging Rewards

For the main thrust of my dissertation, I designed, crafted, and iterated upon GoBot, a custom mobile assistive robot aimed at promoting physical activity for children with and without disabilities. GoBot is modular, meaning that reward hardware can be hot swapped to increase engagement in long-term interactions.

The base version of GoBot is constructed on a Turtlebot2 base running Python and ROS and has a custom 3D-printed reward stack with lights, bubbles, and sounds for promoting engagement and physical activity. GoBot can be teleoperated, or operate with semi or full autonomy. We use a LIDAR sensor and a custom overhead camera sensing system to enable autonomy in GoBot. We constructed GoBot and its many modular hardware components with multiple teams of undergraduate capstone teams and Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) students.

The fully autonomous GoBot uses Behavior Trees to determine robot actions which are most likely to encourage children to move towards the robot and continue interacting.

We have studied GoBot in multiple long-term child-robot interaction studies, the details of which are linked in the associated papers. We currently have two more publications in progress from this study.

Associated Papers:

Ameer Helmi, Emily Scheide, Tze-Hsuan Wang, Samuel W. Logan, Geoffrey A. Hollinger, Naomi T. Fitter, "GoBot: An Autonomous Assistive Robot using Behavior Trees to Encourage Child Mobility," Paper in review to Transactions in Human-Robot Interaction Journal, 2023

Rafael Morales Mayoral, Ameer Helmi, Shel-Twon Warren, Samuel W. Logan, and Naomi T. Fitter, "Robottheory Fitness: GoBot’s Engagement Edge for Spurring Physical Activity in Young Children," Paper accepted to the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Detroit, MI, USA 2023

Ameer Helmi, Tze-Hsuan Wang, Samuel W. Logan, and Naomi T. Fitter, "Harnessing the Power of Movement: A Body-Weight Support System & Assistive Robot Case Study," Paper accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR), Singapore, Singapore, 2023.

Ameer Helmi, Samantha Noregaard, Natasha Giulietti, Samuel W. Logan, and Naomi T. Fitter, "Let Them Have Bubbles! Filling Gaps in Toy-Like Behaviors for Child-Robot Interaction," Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2022.

Ameer Helmi, Tze-Hsuan Wang, Christine Zhan, Kenneth Nys, Pico Sankari, Samuel W. Logan, and Naomi T. Fitter, "GoBot Throw: A Toy-Inspired Ball-Launching Robot For Child-Robot Interaction," Proceedings of the From Modelling to Understanding Children's Behaviour in the Context of Robotics and Social Artificial Intelligence Workshop, held in conjunction with the 2022 International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), Florence, Italy, 2022.

Ameer Helmi, Lucas Dassonville, Christine Zhan, and Naomi T. Fitter, "GoBot Dance: An Air Dancer-Inspired Robot For Child-Robot Interaction," Proceedings of the From Modelling to Understanding Children's Behaviour in the Context of Robotics and Social Artificial Intelligence Workshop, held in conjunction with the 2022 International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), Florence, Italy, 2022.

Joseline Raja Vora, Ameer Helmi, Christine Zhan, Eliora Olivares, Tina Vu, Marie Wilkey, Samantha Noregaard, Naomi T. Fitter, and Samuel W. Logan, "Influence of a socially assistive robot on physical activity, social play behavior, and toy-use behaviors of children in a free play environment: A within-subjects study," Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 2021.

Ashwin Vinoo, Layne Case, Gabriela R. Zott, Joseline Raja Vora, Ameer Helmi, Samuel W. Logan, Naomi T. Fitter, "Design of an assistive robot for infant mobility interventions," Paper accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), Vancouver, Canada (remote), 2021.