TapeBot, the Wood and Sticky Tape Robot Kit, Aims to Manage Children's Expectations of the Hardware

Researchers at KIST Seoul have showcased a modular robotics kit dubbed the TapeBot, designed to entertain and educate children — and to avoid switching them off to the technology by keeping things as simple as possible, including "programming" the robot using "smart" sticky tape.

"Various types of modular robotic kits such as the Lego Mindstorm, edutainment robot kit by ROBOTIS, and the interactive face components FacePartBot have been developed and suggested to increase children's creativity and to learn robotic technologies," the researchers explain. "By adopting a modular design scheme, these robotic kits enable children to design various robotic characters with plenty of flexibility and creativity, such as humanoids, robotic animals, and robotic faces.

"However, because a robot is an artefact that perceives an environment and responds to it accordingly, it can also be characterised by the environment it encounters. Thus, in this study, we propose a modular robotic kit that is aimed at creating an interactive environment for which a robot produces various responses."

A key issue with existing educational-themed robotics kits, the researchers claim, is a gap between what a user expects the robot to be able to do based on its high-tech appearance and what it can actually do once purchased and unboxed. "We presume that decreasing the expectations of consumers toward the functionalities of robotic products may increase their acceptance of the products, because this hinders the mismatch between the expected functions based on their appearances, and the actual functions of the products."

"We believe that the tape, which is found in everyday life, is a perfect material to lower the consumers' expectation toward the product and will be helpful for the consumer's acceptance of it. Second, the tape is a familiar and enjoyable material for children, and it can be used as a flexible module, which users can cut into whatever size they want and can be attached and detached with ease."

The TapeBot itself, then, doesn't look much like your average robot kit: The prototype is built primarily out of wood, housing the motherboard, radio-frequency identification (RFID) reader, a tilt sensor, a speaker, and a battery. The programming tapes, meanwhile, aren't the cassette tapes of eight-bit home computers: They're literally rolls of sticky tape, printed with patterns and — crucially — embedded with RFID tags.

"The main character robot detects the RFIDs embedded in the intelligent tapes on which various images of environments, such as grass, water waves, and roads are printed and generates the corresponding sound," the researchers note. "In addition, different sounds are produced according to the specific settings of an environment by using the tilt sensor. For example, when the grass printed tape is attached to a flat floor, a sheep's bleating sound is generated, which indicates a lawn at low altitude. On the other hand, when the grass printed tape is attached to a slope, the mountain birds' chirping sound is generated, which indicates a mountain at high altitude.

"Although previous robotic kits focused on building a robot, the TapeBot allows its users to focus on the environment that the robot encounters. By reversing the frame of thinking, we expect that the TapeBot will promote children's imagination and creativity by letting them develop creative environments to design the interactions of the main character robot."

A brief one-page research article on the project has been published as a companion to its entry into the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '20), and is available under open-access terms on the ACM Digital Library.