We learned that people wanted to play games with their Cozmo robots!
…unfortunately, Cozmo’s ability to play games is quite limited. He can move forward and backwards with his wheels, and move his arm and head up and down. I needed to use these abilities to figure out a way to get Cozmo to play games with his owners.
I started by sketching ideas of ways that Cozmo could play with his owner:
After speaking with some Cozmo users, ideas which involved sports (specifically Soccer and Basketball) were the most popular – here are some more sketches around those ideas:
I made a basic prototype out of some plastic sheet, dowels, and some (rather ugly-looking!) plastic epoxy. I wanted to see if I could make a simple mechanism that would snap onto Cozmo’s arm without any tools, and allow the robot to pick up a ball, and then “throw” it.
The first prototype worked decently to pick up a ping-pong ball, but the “throw” felt more like a “drop” – not very satisfying
I put together another version with a little spring-loaded arm that would flick the ball forward when the arm is raised and then reset when the arm is lowered (so that the player doesn’t need to touch the arm to make repeated throws – it resets automatically.)
Luckily, Anki had a user testing lab in the office, so I was able to test the attachments with kids to hear their feedback, and observe how they interacted with the game attachments.
The feedback from users helped me figure out how to make an improved version of the attachment that worked even better to pick up and “throw” a ball with Cozmo! I drafted the attachment with SketchUp so that I could be more precise with the dimensions, and make things easier if I needed to build more than one.
