AUP Proposal

Affective Social Quotient

Overview:

Affective Social Quotient (ASQ) investigates ways to teach social communication to children interactively with toys. The goal of this particular project is to help autistic children learn affect and social communications behavior. We will use the metaphor of the "Seven Dwarfs," with each dwarf representing a basic emotion. The project will create a total of seven partially animated and "intelligent" dwarf dolls. When a dwarf is selected and picked up by a user two things will happen: the doll will begin to "animate" and a computer will display movie/commercial/animation clips that are examples of the emotion indicated by the dwarf.

Responsibilities:

I will be responsible for designing and implementing the hardware platform for the project. This will also include writing firmware for the PIC microcontroller. I will also design and interface with the system simple mechanical devices where appropriate. Special emphasize is placed on developing a way to use the IRDA standard for serial communication between the figures and traditional IR-ready PDA’s. Finally, I will share the task with the software side of the group of seamlessly integrating my low level hardware programming with the higher level software that controls the output of movie clips and the GUI of the console.

Hardware Platform

I will use an existing hardware platform developed in the Media Lab. The particular development board contains a PIC16C84, RS-232 chip, IR Receiver/Transmitter, indicator LED’s and various port pins. This should expedite development of the hardware system that will be present in each of the dolls. The hardware capabilities that may ultimately be built into each figure include the following:

1. IR Receive
2. IR Transmit
3. Identification tag
4. Switches
5. Motors
6. Relays
7. Photocells
8. Solenoids
9. Digital Voice Record/Output

Mechanics

The mechanics of the animated figures will be kept to a minimum in order to simplify the project. Mechanical parts will be cannibalized from existing toys if more complex mechanism are desired.

Firmware

Some examples of the code that must be written include:

1. Serial Communication
2. Establish the IRDA Protocol
3. Control various devices including leds, lamps, motors, voice recorders, speakers.
4. Integration of the Java high level interpreter with assembly code.

Conclusion

The finished product of ASQ is scheduled to be deliverable by the end of January. At this time, the entire system will be functional and ready to be integrated in real learning programs for autistic children.