Shutter In the Wild

Shutter the Robot Photographer

About

Shutter is a social robot designed and built by the Interactive Machines Group at Yale University. Shutter comprises a 4-degree of freedom robotic arm and a screen face that renders 2D eyes. Shutter is controlled with several open-source ROS packages.

In the past, the Interactive Machines Group has placed Shutter on a desktop for lab studies and classroom usage, and on a mobile cart to enable in-the-wild deployments. To build your own copy of Shutter, print all of the components in the Materials section, then follow the Build steps. You can find contact information on our Team page.

Work on Shutter was funded by NSF grants IIS-1924802 and IIS-2143109. The Interactive Machines Group also thanks the Yale Provost's Office for supporting the development of Shutter.

Publications

Shutter has been utilized as the robotic platform for several publications, including the following:

Shutter: A Low-Cost and Flexible Social Robot Platform for In-the-Wild Deployments
Thompson, S., Narcomey, A., Lew, A. and Vázquez, M.
Companion of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '24 Companion)
pdf video doi
Designing Social Interactions with a Humorous Robot Photographer
Adamson, T., Lyng-Olsen, C.B., Umstattd, K. and Vázquez, M.
Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
pdf doi
Gaze by Semi-Virtual Robotic Heads: Effects of Eye and Head Motion
Vázquez, M., Milkessa, Y., Li, M.M. and Govil, N.
2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
pdf doi
Shutter, the Robot Photographer: Leveraging Behavior Trees for Public, In-the-Wild Human-Robot Interactions
Lew, A., Thompson, S., Tsoi, N. and Vázquez, M.
2022 Workshop on Human-Robot Interaction in Public Spaces
pdf doi

Build Your Own Shutter Robot