Imagine opening your eyes and being awake for only a half an hour at a time. This is the life that robots traditionally live. This is due to a number of factors such as battery life and wear on prototype joints. Roboticists have typically muddled though this challenge by crafting handmade models of the world or performing machine learning with synthetic data–and sometimes real-world data. While robotics researchers have traditionally used large distributed systems to do perception, planning, and learning, cloud-based robotics aims to link all of a robot's experiences. This movement aims to build large-scale machine learning algorithms that use experience from large groups of people, whether sourced from a large number of tabletop robots or a large number of experiences with virtual agents. Large-scale robotics aims to change embodied AI as it changed non-embodied AI.

DragonBot is a new platform built to support long-term interactions between children and robots. The robot runs entirely on an Android cell phone, which displays an animated virtual face. Additionally, the phone provides sensory input (camera and microphone) and fully controls the actuation of the robot (motors and speakers). Most importantly, the phone always has an Internet connection, so a robot can harness cloud-computing paradigms to learn from the collective interactions of multiple robots. To support long-term interactions, DragonBot is a "blended-reality" character–if you remove the phone from the robot, a virtual avatar appears on the screen and the user can still interact with the virtual character on the go. Costing less than $1,000, DragonBot was specifically designed to be a low-cost platform that can support longitudinal human-robot interactions "in the wild."

I/O Stickers is an electronics construction kit made up of adhesive sensors and actuators. Users can place these special electronic stickers onto contact points in pre-wired and pre-programmed pages, and the pages will transmit the state of the input (sensor) sticker to a corresponding output (actuator) sticker. Building the electronics is a simple matter of matching the sticker to the correct footprint. Users can design the interaction by choosing the sensor and actuator stickers, and then personalize the interface by decorating over the flat, electronic stickers with their choice of craft materials. I/O Stickers is designed to empower users to create electronics while also leveraging existing skills in craft, resulting in works that are creatively expressive as well as technically sophisticated.

Young children learn language not through listening alone, but through active communication with a social actor. Cultural immersion and context are also key in long-term language development. We are developing a robotic conversational partner and a hybrid physical/digital environment for second language learning. In "Le Fonduephone," a young child learns French by sitting down at a cafe table with a plush robotic character and ordering food together. The table is situated within a projected virtual environment that provides an animated backdrop. The character models how to order food and as the child practices the new vocabulary, the food is delivered via projections onto the table's surface. Meanwhile, a teacher observes the interaction remotely via a virtual representation of the cafe and can adjust the robot's conversation and behavior to support the learner.

Nimbus is the first character built around the DragonBot platform, as an exploration into fabricating a believable and "cute" robotic character for children. Through building Nimbus, we learned many new techniques for creating lifelike characters around a robot's physical limitations and advantages. Many furry prototypes were made to support "squash-and-stretch"–the most important principle of animation that can bring inanimate characters to life. Also, fabric-based capacitive sensing was sewn into the fur, so Nimbus can detect when and where he is being touched. Nimbus was made completely in-house, using diverse fabrication techniques ranging from hand-machining mechanical linkages to designing and printing custom 3D parts.

Animated artifacts require many different electronic and mechanical components, as well as appropriate drive software. This complexity has led to a kit-of-parts thinking in designing robotic assemblies, enabling more people to engage with animated devices. However, these robotics kits provide designers with a series of given constraints; the resulting black box becomes a form factor around which design is created rather than an integral part of the completed artifact, and these devices lack the specificity and material diversity of traditionally crafted artifacts. Many rapid prototyping tools propagate the same logic; for example, laser cutters are more frequently used to build casings that hide embedded mechanics and electronics than components that celebrate them. PlywoodServo considers a holistic approach to the design of animated artifacts in order to recapture the magic of engaging with their mechanical and electronic components together.

Using the Preschool of the Future environment, children can create stories that come to life in the real world. We are developing interfaces that enable children to author stories in the physical environment—stories where robots are the characters and children are not only the observers, but also the choreographers and actors in the stories. To do this, children author stories and robot behaviors using a simple digital painting interface. By combining the physical affordances of painting with digital media and robotic characters, stories can come to life in the real world. Programming in this environment becomes a group activity when multiple children use these tangible interfaces to program advanced robot behaviors.

The Alphabots are trans-fictional(xF) mobile and modular semi-autonomous robotic symbol set characters designed to play with preschool aged children (three to six years old). In support of early development goals (literacy, numeracy and shape recognition) educators and parents can take an active role in co-designing playful learning interactions both on and off-screen.