IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2017 - 92

Table 2. An overview of the experiments.
Assembly
Experiment 1

Experiment 2

Experiment 3

Experiment 4

Description

Workshop at the
University of Nizhny
Novgorod summer
school

Workshop at summer
school on social HRI

Studio at the
Conference
on Tangible,
Embedded,
and Embodied
Interaction

Design course,
"Illusion of Life"

Scope

Assemble one Ono

Assemble six Onos

Create robot using
Opsoro and craft
materials

Create robot using
Opsoro and CAD
modeling

Soldering

Yes

Yes

No

No

CAD modeling

No

No

No

Yes

Behavior programming

Standard type

Lua scripting

Blockly

Standard apps

Duration

1d

1.5 d

1d

One semester

Participants

15

20

Six

20

Instructors

Two

Two

Two

Two

Groups

One

Six

Two

Ten

Audience

Social science
students

HRI researchers

HCI researchers

Industrial design
students

When?

September 2014

August 2015

February 2015

February-May 2015

The longer time span of experiment 4 allowed more
time to be devoted to the concept, the character design, and
the materialization of the embodiment. This was not possi-
ble in a one-day workshop. During the course assignment,
interteam collaboration
was encouraged. Teams
were explicitly allowed
While some roadblocks
to exchange materials
and module designs.
remain, the open-source
This encouraged stu-
dents to think about their
approach could facilitate
designs in a more gener-
alized sense, e.g., "Is this
and accelerate future
module useful just for
me or could it be used by
robotics research.
others as well?" During
the assignment, students
also experimented with novel materials for the robot's skin,
including felt, vacuum-formed ethylene-vinyl acetate
foam, and rigid polystyrene. We had not thought of these
techniques, and this illustrates the potential of community
contributions. Further results of experiment 4 are de-
tailed in [31].
Recently, we have had some success in attracting a small
community of Opsoro users. This is mainly the result of
addressing community-related factors, including organizing
workshops, improving documentation, offering better soft-
ware, and improving communication through social media.
Currently, we know of ten independently built Opsoro
robots. In addition, the Ono robot has already been used by
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Design

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March 2017

a third party in published HRI research [33]. We are also
starting to receive software contributions from outside
users: developers have contributed three new apps to our
software platform, as well as a binding to interface Opsoro
with the ROS [33]. The interface with the ROS is interesting
because it offers many reusable software building blocks,
facilitating the process of prototyping with robot software.
Discussion and Conclusion
One challenge researchers often face is the lack of time for
activities that do not directly lead to publishable results. How-
ever, successful open-source projects require many ancillary
activities, including documentation, support, and community
building. Moreover, to go from an experimental setup to an
open-source hardware project requires a significant amount
of time for development and documentation work. Another
factor is that hardware created for research purposes tends to
be very specific, resulting in a niche audience of users.
We have chosen to prepare to start a spin-off company
around the Opsoro platform. The spin-off company would
allow us to develop a stable platform with a sustainable
community as well as find ways of scaling the production
of toolkits beyond the scope of FabLabs. Still, the commer-
cialization process is not without its own challenges. One
of the most difficult questions is balancing open-source
practices with creating a sustainable business revenue. A
number of companies, such as Arduino and Ultimaker,
have achieved success with this, though the open-source
hardware business model is new, and each company
requires a different approach.
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