Disney Design Tool Lets Users Customize Robot Companions

Feeling a little lonely? Does your household feel empty? Perhaps a pet would fill the void. But wait just a second. Pets require responsibility, attention and veterinarian check-ups. In the technological age, there may be a suitable alternative for the busybody incapable of caring for a living creature. Robots. Disney Research, Carnegie Mellon Univ. and ETH Zurich are making strides in that direction, and have designed a system that allows anyone to create a 3-D printable robotic creature. “The recent progress in 3-D printing technology and the advent of powerful, simple-to-program hardware platforms like Arduino now open the door to a new generation of personal robots—unique companions that we custom design according to our needs and preferences,” the researchers write in a paper on the technology.
With the new design tool, novices can specify the shape, size and number of legs for their robotic creatures. Want to add a smidgen of personality? Alter the gait of the robot to give it a unique presence. The editing tool features two viewports, one that allows the user to modify the robot’s structure and movements and another that displays a simulation of the robot’s real-world behaviors. “We aim to reinvent the way in which personal robotic devices are designed, fabricated and customized according to the individual needs and preferences of their users,” said Stelian Coros, a former researcher with Disney who now teaches at Carnegie Mellon Univ. According to Carnegie Mellon Univ., users can load skeletal descriptions into the system, which subsequently creates a geometry and places motors at each joint. Further user customization follows. Upon design completion, the system generates 3-D printable body part designs for fabrication. The researchers designed a number of robotic creatures, including spider-like quadrupeds, a biped and a salamander-like creature. Two of the designs were physically fabricated for validation. The physical behaviors aligned with the predictions from the computer simulation. “It took us minutes to design these creatures, but hours to assemble them and days to produce parts on 3-D printers,” said Bernhard Thomaszewski, a research scientist at Disney Research. “The fact is that it is both expensive and time-consuming to build a prototype—which underscores the importance of a design system such as ours, which produces a final design without the need for building multiple physical iterations.”