Shutter, the Robot Photographer

This project aims to investigate human-robot interactions in the wild with a robot photographer.

The photography application serves to study fundamental questions in HRI, including:

• what kind of behaviors are suitable for initiating situated social encounters?
• how can robots adapt to changes in their social context?
• what does it mean for the robot to take a good portrait photo?
• how can robots personalize the interaction based on users’ responses?

The robot photographer has been a collaborative effort among many students at Yale, including Sydney Thompson, Nathan Tsoi, Tim Adamson, Malak Kahn, Annie Gao, Kendrik Umstattd, C. Burton Lyng-Olsen, Joe Connolly, Simon Mendelsohn, and Kayleigh Bishop.

Publications

Adamson, T., Lyng-Olsen, C.B., Umstattd, K., and Vázquez, M. Designing Social Interactions with a Humorous Robot Photographer. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2020.
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Acknowledgements

The Interactive Machines Group thanks the CEID for providing support to rapidly frabricate many components for this project. We also thank Yale’s Office of the Provost for providing support to incoporate Shutter in the curriculum of CPSC-459/559 Building Interactive Machines. Through this course, students have had an opportunity to contribute to this project.