It Is Your Turn: Collaborative Ideation With a Co-Creative Robot through Sketch

Co-creative systems have been widely explored in the field of computational creativity. However, existing AI partners of these systems are mostly virtual agents. As sketching on paper with embodied robots could be more engaging for designers' early-stage ideation and collaborative practices, we envision the possibility of Cobbie, a mobile robot that ideates iteratively with designers by generating creative and diverse sketches. To evaluate the differences in co-creativity and user experience between the co-creative robots and virtual agents, we conducted a comparative experiment and analyzed the data collected from quantitative scales, observation, and semi-structured interview. The results reveal that Cobbie is more satisfying in motivating exploration, provoking unexpected ideas and engaging designers in the collaborative ideation process. Based on these findings, we discussed the prospects of co-creative robots for future developments of human-AI collaborative systems.