Over the summer of 2024, I deeply enjoyed getting to know the incredible teams at ROBIN and RITMO and had the pleasure of making an unexpected friend: TIAGo. I’ve never spent so much time with a robot, and upon reflection, it changed me.
One of the reasons I returned to engineering school was to pursue my inner child’s ambitions of being an inventor and playing with Legos. The building blocks have gotten more diverse and more complex, and the joy grows each year. This summer, in particular, allowed for a lot of the type of exploration I enjoy.
My project was creating a human-robot interaction experiment. I used the TIAGo robot to play a game of Connect 4 with human subjects. The goal was to build an environment for experimenters to observe people’s stimulation through their pupil dilation while interacting with a humanoid robot.
Thank you again to ROBIN and RITMO for hosting me. Stay curious, and never stop playing.