Blibot

Motivation

For this project, a developmental psychologist was conducting experiments on how subjects perceive an environment when they explore it collaboratively with a mobile robot. They needed to have an interface for the subjects to control the robot, and they needed an interface for the researchers to monitor the experiment and collect data. Adding new experiments as needed was also a requirement.

Activity

We re-used a mobile platform, creating drivers for the hardware that would interface with ROS.

Both the researcher and the subjects had no prior experience with robots so to keep the interface simple and familiar, we went with an html interface served by the robot. This meant that the research only had to turn on the robot and nothing else to start experimenting. Any device nearby could be used to either perform or monitor an experiment as needed.