ROVER: The Reactive Observant Vacuum Emotive Robot
Hanna Wolfe / USA
University of California Santa Barbara
ROVER, the Vacuous Emotive Robot Reactive Observatory, is an interactive sculpture that navigates the gallery and sings emotionally when it meets people. Based on audio and emotion research, ROVER modulates audio qualities such as timbre, fundamental frequency, contour, mode, and tempo to portray emotion. It also learns space, tracking obstacles and people, while navigating using proximity, bump and heat sensors. ROVER is an experimental platform for human robotic interaction and has been used to conduct research on the human affective response to emotive sounds produced by an embodied agent. ROVER has two modes, an active mode where it moves around the space looking for people to interact with and a passive mode where it is stationary and only interacts when approached. ROVER is a biologically awkward alien form trying to learn to communicate and express emotions.
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