PuppetAI: A Customizable Platform for Designing Tactile-Rich Affective Robot Interaction

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04787v1
• Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:37:31 GMT
• Title: PuppetAI: A Customizable Platform for Designing Tactile-Rich Affective Robot Interaction
• Abstract summary: We introduce PuppetAI, a modular soft robot interaction platform.<n>It offers a scalable cable-driven actuation system and a customizable, puppet-inspired robot gesture framework.<n>For our own designs, we have worked with nuanced gestures enacted by "soft robots" with enhanced dexterity and "pleasant-to-touch" plush exteriors.
• Score: 4.426747427265242
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: We introduce PuppetAI, a modular soft robot interaction platform. This platform offers a scalable cable-driven actuation system and a customizable, puppet-inspired robot gesture framework, supporting a multitude of interaction gesture robot design formats. The platform comprises a four-layer decoupled software architecture that includes perceptual processing, affective modeling, motion scheduling, and low-level actuation. We also implemented an affective expression loop that connects human input to the robot platform by producing real-time emotional gestural responses to human vocal input. For our own designs, we have worked with nuanced gestures enacted by "soft robots" with enhanced dexterity and "pleasant-to-touch" plush exteriors. By reducing operational complexity and production costs while enhancing customizability, our work creates an adaptable and accessible foundation for future tactile-based expressive robot research. Our goal is to provide a platform that allows researchers to independently construct or refine highly specific gestures and movements performed by social robots.

Related papers

• A Glimpse into Long-term Physical Coexistence with Intelligent Robots [12.275897522668858]
  PHILIA is a multi-robot agent built around a robot gateway abstraction.<n>It decouples low-frequency, high-semantic agent reasoning from high-frequency, low-level robot execution.<n>We present representative use cases in which agent memory and scene understanding are grounded in robot actions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-07-13T10:40:32Z)
• Introducing M: A Modular, Modifiable Social Robot [2.572404739180802]
  We present M, an open-source, low-cost social robot platform designed to reduce platform friction.<n>M combines a modular mechanical design, multimodal sensing, and expressive yet mechanically simple actuation architecture with a ROS2-native software package.<n>We report real-world use in participatory design and week-long in-home deployments, showing how M can serve as a practical foundation for longitudinal, reproducible social robotics research.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-19T16:51:37Z)
• Shaping Expressiveness in Robotics: The Role of Design Tools in Crafting Embodied Robot Movements [36.147616794820514]
  This paper introduces a movement-centered design pedagogy designed to support engineers in creating expressive robotic arm movements.<n>The iterative approach proposed integrates analytical frameworks from dance, enabling designers to examine motion through dynamic and embodied dimensions.<n>A custom manual remote controller facilitates interactive, real-time manipulation of the robotic arm, while dedicated animation software supports visualization, detailed motion sequencing, and precise parameter control.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-02-04T02:08:16Z)
• Semantic Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis and Real-Time Control for Humanoid Robots [5.531678625546847]
  We present an innovative end-to-end framework for synthesizing semantically meaningful co-speech gestures and deploying them in real-time on a humanoid robot.<n>Our core innovation lies in the meticulous integration of a semantics-aware gesture synthesis module.<n>We demonstrate that our combined system produces semantically appropriate and rhythmically coherent gestures.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-19T02:55:10Z)
• RobotSeg: A Model and Dataset for Segmenting Robots in Image and Video [56.9581053843815]
  We introduce RobotSeg, a foundation model for robot segmentation in image and video.<n>It addresses the lack of adaptation to articulated robots, reliance on manual prompts, and the need for per-frame training mask annotations.<n>It achieves state-of-the-art performance on both images and videos.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-11-28T07:51:02Z)
• Design and Control of a Bipedal Robotic Character [3.650193138379926]
  This work aims to unify expressive, artist-directed motions and robust dynamic mobility for legged robots.<n>We introduce a new bipedal robot, designed with a focus on character-driven mechanical features.<n>We present a reinforcement learning-based control architecture to robustly execute artistic motions conditioned on command signals.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-01-09T12:55:21Z)
• Survey of Design Paradigms for Social Robots [10.618592615516901]
  Social robots leverage multimodal communication, incorporating speech, facial expressions, and gestures to enhance user engagement and emotional support. The understanding of design paradigms of social robots is obstructed by the complexity of the system and the necessity to tune it to a specific task. This article provides a structured review of social robot design paradigms, categorizing them into cognitive architectures, role design models, linguistic models, communication flow, activity system models, and integrated design models.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-30T05:22:31Z)
• Controlling diverse robots by inferring Jacobian fields with deep networks [48.279199537720714]
  Mirroring the complex structures and diverse functions of natural organisms is a long-standing challenge in robotics.<n>We introduce a method that uses deep neural networks to map a video stream of a robot to its visuomotor Jacobian field.<n>Our approach achieves accurate closed-loop control and recovers the causal dynamic structure of each robot.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-07-11T17:55:49Z)
• RoboScript: Code Generation for Free-Form Manipulation Tasks across Real and Simulation [77.41969287400977]
  This paper presents textbfRobotScript, a platform for a deployable robot manipulation pipeline powered by code generation. We also present a benchmark for a code generation benchmark for robot manipulation tasks in free-form natural language. We demonstrate the adaptability of our code generation framework across multiple robot embodiments, including the Franka and UR5 robot arms.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-22T15:12:00Z)
• SoftZoo: A Soft Robot Co-design Benchmark For Locomotion In Diverse Environments [111.91255476270526]
  We introduce SoftZoo, a soft robot co-design platform for locomotion in diverse environments. SoftZoo supports an extensive, naturally-inspired material set, including the ability to simulate environments such as flat ground, desert, wetland, clay, ice, snow, shallow water, and ocean. It provides a variety of tasks relevant for soft robotics, including fast locomotion, agile turning, and path following, as well as differentiable design representations for morphology and control.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-03-16T17:59:50Z)
• Synthesis and Execution of Communicative Robotic Movements with Generative Adversarial Networks [59.098560311521034]
  We focus on how to transfer on two different robotic platforms the same kinematics modulation that humans adopt when manipulating delicate objects. We choose to modulate the velocity profile adopted by the robots' end-effector, inspired by what humans do when transporting objects with different characteristics. We exploit a novel Generative Adversarial Network architecture, trained with human kinematics examples, to generalize over them and generate new and meaningful velocity profiles.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-03-29T15:03:05Z)
• A ROS Architecture for Personalised HRI with a Bartender Social Robot [61.843727637976045]
  BRILLO project has the overall goal of creating an autonomous robotic bartender that can interact with customers while accomplishing its bartending tasks. We present the developed three-layers ROS architecture integrating a perception layer managing the processing of different social signals, a decision-making layer for handling multi-party interactions, and an execution layer controlling the behaviour of a complex robot composed of arms and a face.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-03-13T11:33:06Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.