Smooth organic movements are achieved with tensile mechanisms, elastic components, and a soft exterior cover attached loosely to the body. Blossom’s appearance is open-ended through handcrafted fabric exteriors created and customized by users. The robot’s mechanism can be quickly assembled and partially extended by end-users.

Addressing these challenges, Blossom aims at three design objectives: accessibility, flexibility, and expressiveness. We validate the Shape Structuralizer tool with a qualitative user study where we observed that even novice users were able to generate a large number of structurally safe designs for fabrication.īlossom is an open-source social robotics platform responding to three challenges in human-robot interaction (HRI) research: (1) Designing, manufacturing, and programming social robots requires a high level of technical knowledge (2) social robot designs are fixed in appearance and movement capabilities, making them hard to adapt to a specific application and (3) the use of rigid mechanisms and hard outer shells limits the robots’ expressive capabilities. This also empowers novices to fabricate even complex constructs while ensuring structural soundness. The interactive guidance enables users to repurpose existing surface mesh models, analyze them in-situ for stress and displacement constraints, add movable joints to increase functionality, and attach a customized appearance. This strategy enables novice users to choose designs that both satisfy stress constraints as well as their personal design intent. Shape Structuralizer embeds a recommendation system that computationally supports the user during design ideation by providing design suggestions on local refinements of the design.

We propose Shape Structuralizer (SS), an interactive design support system that repurposes surface models into structural constructions using rods and custom 3D-printed joints.

Current Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools lack proper support for guiding novice users towards designs ready for fabrication.

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