BIBO – iSoftStone · SUGAR project 2017/18

The project · from brief to prototype

What happened, step by step.

01

Challenge

How can humans and machines connect emotionally? The brief asked whether a robot could become a best friend at home, like a pet, for people too busy to build deep emotional ties.

02

What the team learned

Many people keep pets as emotional companions for themselves or their children, but dislike the mess that comes with them.

03

What they built

BIBO is a spherical home robot with a pet-trainer AI. Owners ask it to do something, reward it when it does and repeat. It learns commands such as come here or turn left and reads emotions from touch patterns.

04

Results

User tests showed that people liked BIBO a lot.

05

Impact

The design process gave the partner practical insight into applications of artificial intelligence.

Full project text

The team’s original texts from the project page.

You have all the good reasons for having a pet in your home as your best friend, but don’t want to handle all the messy problems a pet brings into your home. BIBO is such a product that you would want to have.

Challenge

How can humans and machines communicate emotionally? Nowadays people are busy in their life and cannot foster emotional connections too deeply.

Solution

Many people have pets in their homes for their kids and/or themselves as emotional companions. However, they don’t like the messy part of having pets at home. Our solution is design an intelligent toy that behaves like a pet to meet people’s need minus the messy part of a pet. Here comes BIBO!

Impact

When a user brings BIBO home for the first time, BIBO can only make some random moves. Through interactions between the user and BIBO, the user can train BIBO to follow certain commands such as “come here”, “turn left”, “turn right”, etc. BIBO can also sense the emotions of the user through learning the touching pattern and show different emotion displays. For the user, BIBO is a perfect home companion without the messy problems of a pet. Our user tests showed that people like BIBO a lot. This design demonstrated a useful application of artificial intelligence (AI). For sponsors, our design process has provided lots of useful information in AI applications.

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