On 17th of December 2021 we had our last team meeting.
The almost three and a half years went by much too quickly. The BMBF research project VIVA officially ended at the end of December.
Due to the Corona pandemic, the project could not be implemented 1:1 as originally planned. Thus, collaboration and user evaluations took place mainly via video calls from 2020 onwards.
A total of 2 design prototypes, 3 Ballbot prototypes, and 3 generations of the VIVA interactive hardware prototype were developed.
In addition, the cognitive architecture was continuously developed and tested on the Pepper hardware platform.
Evaluation studies were mainly conducted online. This included the use of previously created movies and interactive AR simulations. A total of 9 evaluation studies and 5 methodological studies were conducted to evaluate aspects such as acceptance, ambivalence, trust, design, approach behavior, dialog strategies, etc. In addition, field studies were conducted with Wizard-of-Oz prototypes in elderly care homes and with autistic children. Most of the studies were published by the respective project partners.
We delivered the last VIVA prototypes to the research partners at the end of December. We are happy to have achieved our goals and developed an absolutely innovative social robot in this comparatively short time. We are also very pleased that the research partners want to continue working and researching with VIVA.
And navel robotics is now setting out to market VIVA as its own product under the name NAVEL. The first pilot projects are scheduled to run as early as 2022.
We would like to thank the great VIVA team for the great, inspiring and very professional and heartfelt cooperation.