We are living in an age of AI and technical inventions. It won’t be ambiguous if I say that each new day seems to bring some news about a technical advancement. Rarely are there days when you don’t see some news about a technical advancement, whether it is something big or small. One of the interesting and fascinating inventions humans have made is the development of humanoid robots. In the past year, we have seen so many TikTok videos, Instagram reels, and even news channels showing how advanced and flawless some humanoid robots can be. But for many people, or most common individuals, these robots can be quite intimidating. Interacting with them can feel a little uncomfortable, and some might even say scary. I mean, I will speak for myself (Sudarshan Choudhari) . I think it is quite impressive and captivating to watch a humanoid robot perform certain actions, but actually interacting with it is more like- “Okay, what do I do next? Why is it coming towards me? Okay, stop? What if I break it?” And that is why I say it can be intimidating to work with a humanoid robot.

We, the members of Team Top T.I.E.R. (Themed Interactive Entertainment with Robotics), have been chosen as one of the student pitch project teams this semester. Our mission is to give a character to our G1 or R1 ETC humanoid robots and create an interactive experience where the audience or guests can feel a little more comfortable interacting with them.

Let me formally introduce you to our amazing team:

• • Aidan Terry
    • Production, Narrative, Character, Fabrication, Performance
  • Autumn Chan
    • Fabrication and Hardware
  • Ben Morris
    • Robot, Narrative, Character, Experience Design, Hardware
  • Cayla Kennedy
    • Character, Hardware, Performance, Narrative
  • Linda Wang
    • Narrative, Character, Experience Design, Fabrication
  • Sudarshan Choudhari
    • Production, Robot Software, Narrative, Fabrication
  • Vivian Shen
    • Faculty Advisor
  • Shirley Saldamarco
    • Faculty Advisor

• Ruth Comley

• • Project Consultant 

It was in Spring 2026 when the team pitched a project idea to the faculty and was approved to be part of the Student Pitch Projects for Fall 2026.

Over the summer, the team was super active and productive, working on ideation and team planning. Early in the summer break, the team met to get a clear idea of what everyone was excited to work on and what role each of us would like to take while working on the project.

In one of our meetings, we talked about some of the personality traits the robot could have throughout the interest curves. Initially, we shortlisted the robot to have some of these personality traits:

• Funny
• Clumsy
• Disorganized / Scatterbrained
• Slightly Neurotic
• Energetic
• Cautious & Consistent
• Middle of the road for agreeableness / disagreeableness

To shape our experience around what the audience might enjoy, we designed and circulated a survey. Through this survey, we were curious to know people’s honest thoughts and reactions about encountering and interacting with humanoid robots. We were especially interested in their first impressions and assumptions – good, bad, or otherwise. We created the Humanoid Robot Personality & Interaction Survey to collect these responses. Humanoid Robot Personality & Interaction Survey

And here are some graphic snippets from the survey.

Through this survey, we were also able to connect with a lot of ETC alumni who were interested in becoming our SMEs for the project.

Our potential list of SMEs:

• Logan Olson – Robotics
• Mike Honeck – Character & Experience Design
• Yidi Zhu – Software
• Mim Harries – Narrative Design
• Matt Udvari – MoCap & Story
• Axel Arth – Production
• Tim Eck – Robotics / Character
• Ethan Gagorik – Fabrication
• Cory Garfin – AI & Guest Experience
• Francisco Souki – Game Design
• Casey Ging – Experience Design
• Angie Mendenhall – Design
• Roch Nakajima – Robotics / MoCap

Images from some of our SME meetings.

Alongside our SME conversations, we had a few brainstorming sessions where we discussed potential personality traits, narrative ideas, technology ideas, music, mechanical ideas, aesthetics, settings, actions the audience and robot could perform, verbs associated with robots, and some of the constraints of working with the robot.

In one of the sessions, we decided that each team member would come up with 50 ideas for potential things a robot could do. These ideas could be anything, such as a journalist or other roles we could build an experience around. In the following meeting, we decided that each of us would rank 10 of the cumulative ideas. We then tallied the numbers for the 60 shortlisted ideas to see which ones stood out the most. The hope was that this would help us come up with a character and experience, and give us a starting point for the project.

Well, this was all during the summer. Can you tell that the team was enthusiastic?

The first week started off pretty strong. The team met on a weekend before school officially started to finalize roles and plan our first meeting with our instructors.

On August 8, 2026, we met with our instructors, Shirley and Vivian. During this meeting, our faculty advisors shared their expectations, things we needed to do to get started, information about playtesting, and information we were responsible for sharing with the IT department, such as the project name, producers, and technology requests. We also shared what we had learned from the survey, our conversations with SMEs, and the initial ideation process we had gone through as a team. We then shared the initial eight ideas we had shortlisted from our previous brainstorming sessions.

Our advisors gave us some valuable feedback, and we continued the week with a few more brainstorming sessions. We also signed up for training sessions before we could work with the robot, set up Notion for task tracking, and learned some technical handoffs from the previous semester’s team, SoulOS, who had worked with the G1.

In one of our brainstorming sessions, we listed the top three settings and top four verbs from all the ideas we had shared so far. We then used this list to get some crowd-facing feedback about which setting and verb people would like to see in the experience we were working towards.

On Friday, August 28, 2026, we had this semester’s Playtest to Explore. During the playtest, we collected votes on the settings people would like to see in the experience and the verbs they would like to perform with the robot. This was also an opportunity to collect answers to one of our questions – Would you like to work with the robot or against the robot? Overall, the outcome of the Playtest to Explore was good.

We finalized our most-voted setting as Wild West and our most-voted verb as Steal. So now, the next task for the team was to come up with one idea for an experience that involved the robot, was set in the Wild West, and involved stealing as an action.

And with that, we concluded Week 1 and decided to meet back the following Sunday.

More to come!