I designed functions of a personal companion robot, striking the right balance of personality, function, and entertainment. The bedrock of all designs was using Vector’s 3D understanding of the real world it developed using SLAM (Simultaneous Location And Mapping).
It was exciting playing with this tension as I designed standards as to how Vector's emotions were expressed in a wide variety of his behaviors and features that fused personality with advanced robotics technologies.
Find Charger Escalation
I designed a personality infused “very low battery” sequence where Vector expresses an increasing urgency to find his charger.
Challenge
Vector is a human (user) focused, largely self directed, self charging robot that does a variety of activities. When it fails to charge itself regularly for whatever reason, a “very low battery” sequence needs be activated to drop all other activities and just find the charger. The users around need to know why he’s acting strange.
Approach
There needs to be a series of behaviors that slowly get more urgent as his battery gets closer to critically low. This "escalation path" needs to balance staying independent of the user and in character for as long as possible with the need to keep his battery from getting critically low.
The three main categories of this search are:
Casual Search - Typical search behavior uninterrupted by any other activity.
Urgent - Vector has less than 10% (tunable) of his known battery left. This begins to break character in favor of technical requirements. Vector should acknowledge player commands, but respond to all commands with a unique behavior that shows he can hear you, but can’t do the desired command due to low battery. Face should show a "low battery icon" when turning to the player.
Emergency - Vector needs help from the player. There needs to be a crystal clear, “emergency” animation and sound. His eyes should be replaced with the charger icon. There should be a unique "help" sound, but cannot be words or be confused with other household items like a smoke alarm or microwave beeps, for example.This is the last step before Vector shuts down. This animation and sound combination cannot be used in any other context.
Writing Technical Design Docments, using a series of images and text to describe the expected behavior, I collaborated with the robotics engineers and character animators to implement and iterate on the behavoir to make sure both displines were satisfied.
Result
Virtually everyone who sees the behavior knows what he is doing in a way that is nearly 100% consistent.
This robust behavior was one of the few instances where there was clear consensus that Vector should "break character" in order to solve an emergency, technical issue.
I worked on the "petting" feature, this was a fun experiment to see what items activate his "petting" reaction from his sensor on top of his head. I wanted to include these videos just to show some of the fun I had experiementing with the product. ;)
Normal Petting
New Bliss