An Intelligent Transformable Phone Robot: BaBi

We present an intelligent transformable phone robot named BaBi with multimodal interactions. BaBi begins with a smart phone, transforms to a movable robot from the smart phone when calling, “open”. It realizes various express to extend current smart phone to be far-field, context-driven and multimodal interactions. The new robot form that can establish both autonomous mobility and portability was proposed. Implementation of the proposed transformable robot was shown. We developed a semiconductor chip that controls wheels and servomotors of the proposed robot shape to reduce the robot footprint about the same as a smartphone. Preliminary questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed robot form. When we open it (the smart phone box), it will provide us more services and more convenient functions to bring us humanized use. BaBi likes a treasure box, when opening it we can obtain a lot of goods. Therefore, we call it moonlight box that is in Chinese because we consider BaBi is a treasure. BaBi is a movable, transformable, portable, intelligent partner.