Shybo
“It is a small and shy robot, very curious about the sounds that surround it. However, it doesn’t know how to interpret these sounds that it perceives. It is just scared of too noisy sounds. So, it needs some help to discover and learn from the world around it. Children can help and guide Shybo in this discovery of sounds.”
Shybo used as part of a playful learning activity held at a primary school in Yuncheng, China.
Shybo was developed as part of my doctoral research about child-robot playful interactions, in collaboration with Haipeng Mi, Yuan Yao, and Jing Gao, at Tsinghua University, China.
SHYBO’s current prototype consist of an Arduino Pro Mini board that take data from sensors (potentiometer, button, and switch) and controls a micro-servo and addressable led strips. The Arduino board communicate via Bluetooth with a laptop used to run a sound-analysis middleware developed in Processing and Wekinator, a machine learning software for classification. The middleware is used as sound analysis’ tool and as communication bridge. It receives input data from the Arduino, such as start recording, change class, and change mode, and forward them to the Wekinator via OSC (Open Sound Control). It also receives data from the Wekinator, which runs the trained model and send out the info about the classes.
-
Lupetti, Maria L., Yuan Yao, Haipeng Mi, and Claudio Germak. 2017. Design for Children’s Playful Learning with Robots. Future Internet 9.
Lupetti, M. L. (2017). Shybo. An open-source low-anthropomorphic robot for children. HardwareX, 2.
Lupetti, M. L., Yao, Y., Gao, J., Mi, H., & Germak, C. (2017, July). Design for learning through play. an exploratory study on chinese perspective. In International Conference on Cross-Cultural Design (pp. 565-581). Springer, Cham.