Sungkyunkwan University School of Education Robotics Lab (2009-2010)

robotic facial design for kids with autism

In this project, I worked as a robotic facial designer. The Robotics lab at Sungkyunkwan University’s department of Special Education has been developing a robot for special education use, specifically, educating robots for kids with autism. Because researches has shown that autistic children interacts better with machines than humans, it was our team’s mission to develop a robotic face that a) resembles human emotional expression, b) simple and designed for kids, and c) has the minimal change of features for maximum difference between expressions.

In order to build the first prototype, we looked into educational robots (B2B) that already existed in the market:

The two popular models in the market were Pepper the robot from Japan’s SoftBank and two prototypes from Yujin Robot in Korea (shown in the picture above). However, these existing robots did not have enough facial expressions we were looking for. As a result, we started from a very basic pixel drawing of facial expressions that a robot may make. I participated in this study for 3 months as a lead designer.