Opla Flower Robot Companion #cloudgames2022

This is the Opla Stress flower. A social desk robot created with an Arduino Opla kit and recycled materials whose purpose is to try to reflect your emotional state and act over your environment to help you to fight against your stress and anxiety.

A video explaining in detail all the features that the robot has at this moment:

The flower has been created using commonly recycled materials:

• One cheap chopstick

• Some cardboard

• Some spare lego pieces

• Pringles can cover

• Small plastic pot

• Felt and tape to create the petals of the flower

• Zip tie and hot glue to do the assembly

• Some coins inside the plastic pot to add more weight to the pot

The robot is designed to be a calm and friendly pal that will be on your desktop while you work. The flower is capable of detecting your stress using various methods, the most important and human one is just asking you from time to time! In the picture, you can see how the flower is asking you to enter a value about how do you feel, been the green very happy and the red very sad or bad. You can also enter that feedback doing a gesture to the left in the face of the flower.

Using that user feedback as a base, the robot is capable of adding more or less stress taking into account external factors like, for example, a very hot or cold room, you hitting your table in a frustrating moment, and so on. The idea is to incorporate and experiment with more and new external factors in the near future, like reading your calendar to know how busy your day is going to be, parsing the news to see if the headlines contain mostly positive or negative words... all that you can imagine that can be useful for you and your health!

Of course, the flower is connected to the Arduino cloud, being possible to act over different devices at events in your daily life thanks to the IFTTT webhook. Do you want to automatically turn on the coffee machine if you are so tired? Or put a visual alarm using your Hue lights to take a break for a walk if your stress is too high? With the Opla Flower is possible!

Once the flower knows what is your stress level over 10 it will show different faces to create an empathetic connection with you and make you aware at a glance about your stress situation.

The flower is also capable of sending notifications to your phone to try to convince you to take a break, for example, for a walk.

Of course, you can see your stress historic data and configure different options using the webpage or cellphone app dashboard.

This is just the beginning!

Future iterations will have a 3D printed body with motors to have more features and implement even more emotions.The Opla flower V1 is a project created for the Arduino Cloud Games 2022 and it's just a starting point to have an Open Source Desk social robot platform that everyone can build, improve and expand to make our daily lives just, hopefully, a little bit better!!!