FLEXI: A Robust and Flexible Social Robot Embodiment Kit

Abstract

The social robotics market is appealing yet challenging. Though social robots are built few remain on the market for long. Many reasons account for their short lifespan with costs and contextspecificity ranking high amount them. In this work, we designed, fabricated, and developed FLEXI, a social robot embodiment kit that enabled unlimited customization, making it applicable for a broad range of use cases. The hardware and software of FLEXI were entirely developed by this research team from scratch. FLEXI includes a rich set of materials and attachment pieces to allow for a diverse range of hardware customizations that ensure the embodiment is appropriate for specific customer/researcher projects. It also includes an open-source end-user programming interface to lower the barrier of robotics access to interdisciplinary teams that populate the field of Human-Robot Interaction. We present an iterative development of this cost-effective kit through the lenses of case studies, conceptual research, and soft deployment of FLEXI in three application scenarios: community-support, mental health, and education. Additionally, we provide in openaccess the full list of materials and a tutorial to fabricate FLEXI, making it accessible to any maker space, research lab, or workshop space interested in working with or learning about social robots.

Designing for culturally responsive social robots: An application of a participatory framework

“…We employed numerous non-verbal methods to ensure accessibility for multilingual learners of various English proficiency levels. We used FLEXI ( Alves-Oliveira et al, 2022 ), a flexible and customizable robotic system which allowed co-designing and increased participation for language learners to integrate their cultural preferences in facial features, embodiment, and child-robot interaction. FLEXI is a social robot designed by Björling and Cakmak at the University of Washington.…”