DU Build-A-Bot is an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Denver, building an interactive robot design application to facilitate robot design research. The "Build-A-Bot" project is developing a novel research platform implemented as a web-accessible 3D game that affords data collection of user-provided robot designs. The designs are used to train ML models to better evaluate robot designs, predict how a given design will be perceived, and create new robot designs.
The project is led by Dr. Kerstin Haring and Dr. Daniel Pittman at the University of Denver.
Within this interdisciplinary team of students, professors, and post-grad volunteers, I have contributed to the UX/UI testing, machine learning, and neuroscience experiment teams.
One of my largest roles was for our fNirs (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) neuroscience study. Given images of both people and robots, I used Affinity Photo to alter these images to match two stimulus conditions: painful experience (a syringe in the cheek) and pleasurable experience (a cotton swab touching the cheek). This editing was relatively straight forward for the people, but when it came to the robots, it was an interesting challenge for me to imaging how a medical tool meant for humans would look if used on varying robots.