The Snackbot: Documenting the Design of a Robot for Long-term Human-Robot Interaction

This paper presents the design of the Snackbot, a robot that will deliver snacks in two of Carnegie-Mellon University's buildings. The robot is intended to provide a useful, continuing service and to serve as a research platform for long-term Human-Robot Interaction. Such research poses several technical, interaction, and design challenges. First, the robot must be robust and powerful enough to operate autonomously and interact with multiple users for extended periods of time. The technology should also be flexible enough to accommodate technical improvements and new applications. To test different approaches to human-robot interaction over time, researchers should be able to manipulate aspects of the robot's physical appearance and behavior. The authors are particularly interested in how a robot delivers a service after the initial novelty effect has worn off. The design process, which occurred over 24 months, is documented as a contribution for others in Human-Robot Interaction who may be developing social robots that offer services. They describe the phases of the design project, and the design decisions and tradeoffs that led to the current version of the robot. The paper contains the following subheadings: Context of Use; Design Goals; Snackbot Team; System Overview, including Hardware, Software, Form, and Interaction; Design Process, including Needs Analysis and Form Giving and Interaction Design; Second Prototype, including Housing, Tray, Internal Structure, Head and Face, and Interaction Design; and Lessons Learned. Presented at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (4th) (HRI 2009) held in La Jolla, CA on 9-13 Mar 2009. Sponsored in part by grant CRI-0709077. Prepared in cooperation with Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design, Pittsburgh, PA.