Puffy — An inflatable robotic companion for pre-schoolers

Abstract

Puffy is a learning and playful robotic companion for pre-school children. Designed in cooperation with a team of educators and inspired by Disney's Baymax, Puffy has a combination of features which makes it unique with respect to existing robots used in educational contexts. It is mobile and has an egg-shaped inflatable and soft body; it supports multimodal interaction, reacting to children's gestures and movements, facial expressions and emotions, and communicates using voice, lights, movements in space, and inside-out projections on its body. The paper describes the design of Puffy and discusses an exploratory study that has involved 79 children aged 4-5 at a local pre-school to investigate the Likeability of the robot and how much children enjoyed, engaged to and remembered some specific design features and play activities.