The following is a record of what I contributed during my time as a research assistant working on the Tilar assistive robotics project. My main focus was working on the C# interface that the therapists will be using to control or “program” the robot during therapy sessions. First of all we searched for different existing programs to use as inspiration that are intuitive to use for people who aren’t familiar with programming concepts. Our main inspiration came from music programs such as itunes and windows media player as well as powerpoint programs. These are very common programs and most people are familiar with the functionality available through them. We wanted to allow the user to have a variety of primitive motions that could be combined in almost any way to script behaviors. At this time the developed interface allows the user to drag a few behaviors onto a menu at the bottom of the window and then play those behaviors one after the other. Not implemented yet is the ability to re-order the behaviors once they are in the lower window.

Recently the ability to command Pleo through the interface has been implemented. When the two boxes labeled happy and sad are dropped in the bottom window and the play button is pressed Pleo will perform a happy action followed by a sad action. In the future we plan to be able to command Pleo using a hand-held wireless system. At this time we have not clearly defined how the C# interface will work with the wireless control system. This will be defined later.

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