NRI:INT: Integrating Robotic and AI Technologies to Support Embodied Collaborative Design

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Collaborative design, in which team members work together to determine requirements, develop design ideas, brainstorm and review physical products, is common in many industries such as product design, website and interaction design, and architecture. Collaborative design involves hands-on activities such as sketching, diagraming, and creating and manipulating physical prototypes. With the increasing globalization of the workforce, collaborative design is now often done by virtual teams in which some members may not be physically collocated with the design space. However, conventional collaboration tools like video conferencing or shared documents fail to meet the needs of virtual design teams because these tools are designed to support group activities that do not involve physical space or objects. This project aims to solve this problem and better support virtual design teams using human friendly robots to support distributed hands-on design activities. The project will create a "design studio of the future" that integrates human-robot interaction and autonomous robotics to create a stronger sense of shared space. The studio will allow members of virtual design teams to engage with physical space and objects as successfully as members of collocated teams. Specifically, the project will (a) develop a framework for understanding the technology needs of virtual design teams; (b) develop and evaluate a set of interface and control techniques for telepresence robots and manipulators that will support key phases of the design process; (c) develop and evaluate models and algorithms of robot autonomy that will make telepresence tools easier for virtual design teams to use; and (d) integrate and evaluate the techniques and findings in laboratory and field studies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.