Digital Media Final - Submission

Digital Media Final - Submission 

1. INTRODUCTION

PetRo is a homogeneous modular Pet-Like Robot designed to work together with people as part of a human-robot team operating in dangerous, difficult to access or unpredictable scenes of operation. For such a team to operate effectively and successfully, without the need for specialist training, there should be a certain level of understanding between the user and his/her robot. From the user’s perspective, body language, and non-verbal communication are additional modalities that could be relied upon for a better understanding of the robot. Indeed, non-verbal and emotional expression by a robot could benefit communication with its user, particularly if these expressions are intelligible and are part of a wider multimodal language. The robot’s emotions can be construed as reflections of internal states and conditions – their expressions should be intuitive to understand, as if they were natural. Postures, gait, and body expressions can communicate a wide range of emotions. Adopting a multi-modal approach, where bodily sounds and musical utterances are also used, can reinforce the expression of emotions and facilitate their perception. Combining breathing rates, heartbeats, postures and movements as well as music is proposed in this paper to deliver an intuitive way of understanding the robot’s current state. We believe these modalities can deliver a vocabulary of emotions that is limited, but one that should be reliably and quickly recognised. This approach is different to the expression of emotion in speech. It is however, similar to what has been proposed. It is more akin to making PetRo a robot that is at the same time an “assisting” and an “interactive stimulation” robot. We also believe that the nature and the richness of the User Experience (UX) yielded by PetRo should be inspired from the relationship between companion dogs and their owners. Dogs are of particular interest in that they have been domesticated very early in human history and are now owned mostly for companionship.

2. FINAL

For my final piece I will creating a film where the 3D CAD model of PetRo will interact with a dog from the physical world, digital meets physical.

3. STORYBOARD

Stage 1

Both the digital and physical elements will be in the scene, and PetRo will begin to lower his head.

Stage 2

Once PetRo has lowered his head it will then begin to rotate his head back and forth to the side while also making noises, as the dog in the physical world begins to move his head as he is intrigued with PetRo.

Stage 3

PetRo begins to move back away from the physical world, shortly followed by the dog.

Stage 4

PetRo comes to a stop and the dog sits patiently. PetRo continues to rotate his head back and forth to the side while also making noises, as the dog avidly watches.

4. FINAL FILM

5. SELF-EVALUATION

-What worked?

Everything went as I planned, adding in all of my elements and bringing them together worked effortlessly in After Effects.

-What didn’t work?

My time management/time frame didn't go as expected. I would of liked to of left more time to render out my CAD animation because I had to reduce my quality to make the final.

-What you found particularly good or enjoyable, etc?

I really enjoyed been able to use After Effects, I found the program relatively easy to use and I was able to find many online tutorials on Youtube etc to help me with creating parts of my film.

-How might you want to continue or expand the project in the future?

Some possible plans for the future are to increase the length of film by adding more movements, such as adding more interaction between the digital and physical world. E.g. PetRo could try to enter the physical world but instead knocks over the window.