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This is not a conventional CD player. Built using repurposed CD-ROM drives, the project explores ownership, repairability, and the physical experience of music.

I haven't posted here in a while, but much has happened since I walked into BCID in early February. I've built two iterations of a prototype, tightened up my story, worked in feedback from disabled people I've met, and started meeting with an amazing thesis advisor.

Let's start with my thesis advisor. Her name is Chancey, and she works at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, where one of her recent projects is Dimensions: Community Tools for Creating Tactile Graphics & Objects. She’s been really great at helping me think through how people might live and interact with furniture robots, giving me examples of existing interfaces that are designed for disabled people that I might learn from and incorporate into my project, and planning out next steps together. We missed our meeting this week since she was at the annual CSUN assistive technology conference in San Diego, and I’m looking forward to our upcoming meeting to hear what she learned out there.

Presenting at BCID

On February 22nd, I presented my thesis project to a support group that meets weekly at the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled. I was really nervous: I had no idea how the project would be received, how much explanation of the tech I would have to do, and whether the idea of a robot that will likely be quite expensive compared to typical furniture would have any appeal.

I needn’t have worried. When I showed the audience the animations from this post, they started responding with questions and ideas before I had the chance to describe the animation to the visually-impaired members of the support group. Unfortunately I was so caught up in answering questions and digging deeper into the ideas that were coming at me that I neglected the non-sighted members of the audience, and for that I’m truly regretful.

In general, the feedback I got was related to how the furniture could better serve people who use powered wheelchairs, things to consider for the furniture to be eligible for Medicare/Medicaid, and concerns about durability and performance. In more detail:

Height-adjustability was a big hit. People set up their power chairs differently depending on their height and what feels comfortable to them, and as a result often find themselves unable to sit under a table. It made me think about how it is common for an office chair to be height-adjustable, but not for desks and tables. This makes sense when you’re thinking about accommodating people of different heights and body shapes, but if surfaces were also adjustable then you would accommodate even more people.

“We knock things over all the time, so this thing has to be waterproof.” Durability was a big concern. Waterproofing to protect from accidental spills was a top priority. The ability to withstand bumps without rolling away or falling over is important too. A subthread of this conversation was the idea of having a lip around the top surface of the furniture to prevent things from rolling off.

Stability is crucial if the furniture is going to support the weight of someone leaning on it and using the grab handles to stand up from a seated position or transfer from a wheelchair to a bed or a couch. There was concern that because the robots are wheeled, they would roll away under weight. This was a good insight, and a future version of my prototype should have a smart way of locking the wheels or lifting the wheels off the ground when someone puts a lot of weight on it. This also brought about discussion about how powerful the motors would be, and whether they would be able to generate enough lift.

One lady was very into the idea of using the furniture as a “smart walker,” and this launched a discussion about how fast the furniture should roll, and how one might control its speed and direction manually. She wanted variable speed, “for good days and bad days.”

Everyone wanted lots of storage on the furniture. The idea that they could have things they need frequently—whether it is their phone, remote controls, meds, reading materials, or anything really—on a rolling cart that could come to them wherever they were in their homes was a very popular one.

People wanted more features: a way to open doors, a built-in light for people with low-vision, simple and hassle-free charging (with a meter to indicate how much charge is left), help putting on shoes... all ideas that lead to different opportunities to explore.

One person shared an idea that she had been talking about with her coworker for a while: a “picker-upper” that could help someone who has fallen out of a wheelchair or off of their couch to get up without assistance. She really wanted this device, since the only option in most cases is to call emergency services, who would then proceed to knock down her door in order to enter her apartment and help her. She lives alone, and worries that if this were ever to happen, her landlord would have enough reason to evict her, meaning she would end up in an assisted living facility (a “home”)—something she really doesn’t want to happen.

Finally, it was great to hear people say they liked the style of the furniture and that they wanted it to be “colourful” and “pretty.” I heard: “Everything that is designed for us is medical and ugly.”

Prototype 1

After I got my feet wet with prototyping robotics with ROS (the Robot Operating System), I ordered more parts and built a bigger, sturdier version of the robot base out of plywood. My goal was to be able to put existing pieces of furniture on it and see how people react to furniture gaining autonomy.

Making robots is hard, and I’m grateful for open-source projects like ROS and Linorobot that make getting started much easier.

Prototype 2

I’m currently in the process of building the next prototype iteration. This time, I’m making the whole thing: autonomous base, cart-like top, and height-adjusting motors. I started off by ordering the parts I need, and modeling the furniture around them in CAD. I designed it so that it could be cut out of a single sheet of half-inch plywood on the CNC machine at our prototyping lab, the Visible Futures Lab.

I was walking home from the subway and just looking at storefronts, and saw this piece of paper in a glass door:

I popped in today, and the staff there was super nice, though a bit annoyed at first (I should have called ahead!). I mainly spoke to Sandrina, the Program Manager at BCID.

I explained that I was a student doing a master’s thesis on assistive technology in the home, and she told me what BCID offers in terms of training, independent living skills classes, a venue for support groups, among other services (and they’ve been around since the 1950s!). Then I described to her my robot furniture idea and showed her an animated rendering of one example, and was happy (and surprised) to see her eyes light up. She seemed to get the idea pretty instantly, and called over her colleague Veronica to take a look as well. Veronica, who was using a powered wheelchair, also got the concept right away, and immediately thought of two of BCID’s clients that she wanted to show it to.

It was validating to see that folks who work with people with disabilities every day were able to see value in the concept without much explanation on my part. This was much different than the reaction I normally get, which is usually “I don’t get it.”

Of course, a few questions came up:

Why are you here? Sandrina wanted to know what I wanted from the moment I walked in the door. It seems that a lot of students visit BCID, many wanted internships on short notice.

What is your dream outcome? Sandrina asked this, very matter-of-factly. It caught me a little off-guard, because I don’t really think I’ve visualized what my dream outcome would be. I was there to learn about the population I want to serve, and Sabrina was asking me about my own desires.

How do you expect people to control this thing? I was happy to hear this question, because it’s one I don’t have the answer to but want to try and prototype ideas for soon. We talked about joysticks (her idea), voice interfaces (my idea), and gestures.

On the other hand, there were questions I was expecting that weren’t asked:

Who is this for? I thought that I would be grilled on my intended audience, but that never came up. This is in direct contrast with most designers I’ve shown this to, who always want to anchor things in a target user group.

How much would it cost? I think this is something I’ve been worrying about: would this solution make economic sense for the end user? Or would it cost less to get an assistance dog or do a simple home remodel? Perhaps this question will come up later on in the process.

Why are you making this? I was worried that I would be asked about my motivations. I shouldn’t have worried so much.

Our next prototype for thesis is a critical one. Our instructor Eric writes that it "must be realistic enough and the overall presentation complete enough that users can evaluate the viability of your idea."

My plan is to build a larger scale version of my last prototype, that is powerful enough to place smaller items of furniture on to quickly test the idea of roaming semi-autonomous furniture robots.

Features

Must-have:

Obstacle-avoidance

Configurable interface

Voice

Physical controls

Gestures

Eye tracking

Myo armband or myoelectric sensors

Powerful motors (ability to hold furniture)

Powerful battery

Nice-to-have

Autonomy / SLAM

Wireless charging

Looks nice

Fidelity

Functional: high-fidelity

I want it to be a real robot with a real UI that I can test

Aesthetic: mid to low

I just need it to work, but it would be nice if it were made of wood and looked semi-finished

UI: mid

I need it to be finished enough to start testing, and flexible enough to try out with different interfaces

Testing goals

Test different UI types (priority 1)

Test people's response to autonomous furniture (priority 2)

Test usefulness (priority 0?)

Test possible functionality — this is the fun part

Personal goals

Build something I'm proud of

Make a semi-autonomous robot, at least with obstacle avoidance

Feedback

I shared this with my thesis buddy Alex (who is a great thesis buddy!) and he had a few questions:

What is the thing going to do? I've been prototyping the interface and the robotic components of the furniture, but I'm still unclear on what functionality the furniture will have. How will it make people's lives easier?

Do you really need to go this far with your prototype? What would you learn with the prototype that you want to build? Building off of the first question, Alex is wondering if I could learn what I need to in a much simpler way. He's suggestion I could just use a remote control car as a proxy for a robot.

Writing value propositions is hard, especially writing variations on them. I started with these two (ignore the names I'm trying for the project, they're just placeholders):

1

FOR people with mobility impairments WHO want to live more independently at home, POLTERGEIST is a suite of modular furniture robots THAT assist with mobility around the home. UNLIKE other robot assistants, POLTERGEIST doesn’t feel like another presence in your home, letting you feel like you are in control.

2

FOR people with disabilities WHO want an alternative to disability remodeling, TILQA is a series of customizable furniture robots THAT adapt homes to their owners’ needs. UNLIKE Ori, TILQA focuses on adaptation rather than space-saving.

I got feedback from Katarina and Wei Ting:

What does a "suite" or "series" mean? It sounds like robot furniture will take over your home, which is scary.

What does "doesn't feel like another presence in your home" mean?

How do the furniture bots make you feel like you're in control?

Based on that feedback, here's an updated draft of the value prop:

3

People with mobility impairments want to live more independently at home. Activate provides modular furniture robots that assist with mobility in indoor spaces. Unlike other robot assistants, Activate’s offerings are unintrusive, familiar, and fit naturally into people’s homes and lifestyles.

Imagine your furniture was smart. Let's say your side table could come around from beside the couch and stop in front of you, so that you can put your empty coffee mug on it and banish it to the kitchen. How would you communicate to the side table that that's what you wanted to do?

For a quick two-week prototype, I decided to build the basis of a robot platform so that I could start testing out different interfaces. The UI here is not necessarily an app. People could communicate with their robot furniture in a number of ways:

Physical controls, like a joystick, game controller, or keyboard

Software controls, like an app on a phone or tablet

Voice commands, perhaps even through a product like Amazon's Echo line or Google Home

Something less obvious, like eye-tracking, morse code, whistling…

I put together my robot from a combination of kit parts, laser-cut pieces of acrylics, and components pruchased form various sources.

The software running on the robot is ROS, an open-source Robot Operating System that is quickly becoming the standard for robotics project, by way of the Linorobot project. It took a lot of wrangling to get all the software running just right on the raspberry pi, but I finally was able to get a functional prototype built.

Next steps:

Make the robot autonomous

Attach the interfaces from the list above and test them out

Build a bigger robot that I can place furniture on to approximate the final product

Things to address:

Is this going to be creepy?

Are large autonomous moving object scary?