Emotional Support Drone

Recent work in the human-robot interaction community has revealed drones as social entities with emotional capabilities, beyond their initial status of mechanical objects. We build upon this work and envision drones as emotional support technology. To evaluate the validity of this concept, we outlined a design space for Emotional Support Drones (ESD) in our preliminary work. In this project, we will focus on the design and implementation of ESD via different prototyping stages. In particular, we will be investigated relevant interaction techniques for different contexts and situations of use of ESDs. The results of these formative explorations will help to establish which interaction metaphors are best suited for ESDs and inform future technological designs. This work will contribute to the growing field of human-drone interaction and the role of robots as supportive technology.

Faculty Supervisor:

Karon MacLean

Student:

Partner:

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Education

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program: