This Soda News item was written on 21 June 06.
Matt and Fiddian were delighted by the children’s response to the prototype robot Soda has created for them with the help of Creative Partnerships London East. They were incredibly excited and took immediate ownership of the child sized mobot (Mobile Robot). Their first impressions were: “it’s sweet” , “it’s fast” and “it’s like a footballer!”
The mobot is designed to be dressed or modified by the children. In a very quick exercise to test this approach they applied characterisations to it. Amongst other things they imagined and tested transforming the mobot’s persona to: Kitty, Phoenix, Tree, Monster-X Car, Alien and Super Robot
The children said they would also like it to: drive itself, nod, have hands that can grab and hold to “help you fetch pencils and things”, be taller, talk, shake and vibrate, have a water fountain, be covered with lights, have a camera and screen and to respond and be interactive, maybe to voice commands. Some, sadly not all, of these activities will be enabled by the next build iteration.
Soda is really pleased with the way this project is evolving, there appears to be a current revival of interest in social robotics which Shapla’s mobot taps into. We are also taking a very iterative approach to the development of the Mobot and hope for it to be very modular and flexible and so have a life far beyond what we do with it at the school.