Abstract: This talk will present the design approach for technological tools that may enhance playful interaction for a vast variety of people, e.g. for play, education, cardiac patients, stroke patients, hospitalised children, home care, autistic children, dementia patients, and handicapped. The approach builds upon the development of modular robotics to create a kind of playware, which is flexible in both set-up and activity building for anybody and anywhere. Key features of this design approach are modularity, flexibility, and construction, immediate feedback to stimulate engagement, activity design by end-users, and creative exploration of play activities. These features permit the use of such modular playware by a vast array of users, including elderly and disabled who often could be prevented from using and taking benefits from modern technologies. For instance, the creative play activities with modular playware helps confidence and self-esteem blossom as young children meet success in activities that are fun. The objective is to get any person moving, exchanging, experimenting and having fun, regardless of their cognitive or physical ability levels. By offering exciting activities that entice users to participate, the interactive playware technologies can not only help them reap the physical benefits of exercise, but also provide opportunities for them to learn, share, express feelings, set goals, and function independently.
I will illustrate the design approach by a system composed of different modular robotic devices that by its modularity is used for creating playful experiences in a vast variety of application areas, e.g. music, sport, play and rehabilitation, e.g. most recently for the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa. The system composed of the modular robotic devices engages the user in physical activities, and I will show how it motivates to perform physical activities by providing immediate feedback based upon playful physical interaction with the system. The modularity, ease of use and the functionality of the devices such as modular robotic tiles and cubic I-BLOCKS suit well into these kinds of scenarios, because they can provide feedback in a generic way. It is therefore possible to create applications with different stimuli and to dynamically change parameters to provide immediate feedback to the users. The modularity allows to investigate adaptivity both as changes in the physical structure and in the processing of the modules (e.g. by neural networks).
This gives ample room for the development of playware, i.e. intelligent hardware and software that creates play and playful experiences amongst users of all ages. Indeed, design principles from modular robotics, embodied AI, interaction design and cultural studies allow us to create playware for diverse application fields such as welfare robotics (e.g. home care, physiotherapy, autism therapy, dementia therapy), sport, music, playground play and fitness training. In the presentation, I will show numerous examples from DJ remix music, rock music, physical rehabilitation, playgrounds, soccer, and use in Africa.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Professor Henrik Hautop Lund, Center for Playware at Technical University of Denmark, is known internationally for his work in bringing robotics to use in novel ways. His approach is to combine modular robotics and modern artificial intelligence to create novel solutions to problems that occupy the citizens of the World, e.g. obesity, rehabilitation, and 3rd World development. He has recently founded the Center for Playware to focus even further on how playful aspects of robotics may provide motivation for any citizen to perform different kinds of interaction with the robots of our future daily life. He chaired the Robots at Play festivals in the open city areas where researchers, artists, entertainers, and citizens meet through playful hands-on experience with robotics in the daily life of the citizens. In all cases, Lund has shown how the combination of a modern artificial intelligence, modular robotics and entertainment may provide novel opportunities in play, rehabilitation, sport, music, teaching, third World development, etc., because the approach provides non-expert users easy access to the technology in a playful and motivating way.
Professor Henrik Hautop Lund has published more than 135 scientific articles in the field of robotics, he has been a member of the Danish Research Council, and he has been invited to present his robotic work in numerous occasions, for instance for the Emperor of Japan at Akasaka Palace in Tokyo. He has been keynote speaker at the major conferences in the field, such as IROS and Ro-Man. He founded and headed the LEGO Lab in 1997-2000. He founded the RoboCluster industrial promotion organization. He invented the RoboCup Junior robot football game for children, and his Adaptronics group won the RoboCup Humanoids Free Style World Championship 2002 in front of 120.000 spectators. Also, he developed the Laudrup, Hogh & Lund RoboSoccer, which was used at the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Further, he developed the RoboMusic in collaboration with World Music Award winner, remix musician Funkstar De Luxe. Professor Lund’s work has received world-wide interest from news media, e.g. CNN, BBC and WIRED to name a few, and he was nominated for the award for the best entertainment robots and systems research over the last 20 years at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).