Beau is a public service robot that posts its experiences on the internet. This robot was employed during the COVID-19 pandemic to roam the lobby spaces of buildings, encouraging and assisting visitors in taking temperature checks. On the other hand, using its built-in camera, Beau was able to capture special events and generate short related posts, which were published on a web application designed in a social media style.
Beau was specifically designed to explore the impact of a robot's ability to perceive its surroundings and reflect upon them on the intimacy felt towards the robot. We deployed Beau in the field and conducted studies, discovering that users perceived Beau as possessing a higher level of social capability in terms of warmth compared to standard robots.
As the lead designer and researcher for this project, I actively led all processes, including ideation, concept design, hardware production, software development, study design and execution, analysis of study results, and paper writing.
