The social robot ‘Flobi’: Key concepts of industrial design

This paper introduces the industrial design of the social robot `Flobi'. In total, three key concepts influenced the industrial design: First, the robot head of Flobi appears as a cartoon-like character and has a `hole-free' design without any visible conjunctions. Second, Flobi has dynamic features to display not only primary emotions, but also shame, a typical secondary emotion. Third, the structural design implements exchangeable modular parts. Through modular design, the underlying hardware is quickly accessible and the visual features of the robot (e.g., hairstyle, facial features) can be altered easily. A first study demonstrated the successful implementation of Flobi's dynamic features, whereas a second study demonstrates that the exchangeable hair modules influence gender-schematic perceptions of the robot.