Expressive, Interactive Robots: Tools, Techniques, and Insights based on Collaborations

In our experience, a robot designer, behavior architect, and animator must work closely together to create an interactive robot with expressive, dynamic behavior. This paper describes lessons learned from these collaborations, as well as a set of tools and techniques developed to help facilitate the collaboration. The guiding principles of these tools and techniques are to allow each collaborator maximum flexibility with their role and shield them from distracting complexities, while facilitating the integration of their efforts, propagating important constraints to all parties, and minimizing redundant or automatable tasks. We focus on three areas: (1) how the animator shares their creations with the behavior architect, (2) how the behavior architect integrates artistic content into dynamic behavior, and (3) how that behavior is performed on the physical robot.