Robota: Clever toy and educational tool

Abstract

Therapeutic and educational applications of robots have created a demand for robots showing a number of social skills. These skills include the capacity to imitate, to learn from demonstration, to interpret gestures and to recognize speech. Robot toys are an ideal platform to investigate the potential and limitations of human–robot social interactions.

This paper presents Robota, a mini-humanoid doll-shaped robot. Robota is used in an introductory robotics class at the undergraduate level. The class offers an introduction to different tools necessary for building human–robot social interactions. Through a series of hands-on projects, students learn how to use vision and speech processing and how to design learning algorithms. The goal of each project is to create an educational and entertaining game for normal and disabled children.

Introduction

During the past 10 years, researchers have identified a number of social skills that robots ought to be provided with. These include the ability to recognize others, to interpret gestures and verbal expressions, and to recognize and to express emotions [5]. One of the most fundamental and, perhaps, the most difficult skill to program is the ability to learn from others. This is known as social learning in the study of natural systems [17]. Social learning includes learning by imitation, that is learning through the observation of others’ behavior, and social facilitation, where the mere presence of others enhances learning of tasks.

Teaching skills, whether cognitive, verbal or motors, is the very motor of human society, and relies importantly on human ability for social learning. Human ability to learn from socially interacting with others is so much taken for granted that the few people who are impaired in this ability (such as people with autism [7]) have enormous difficulty to adapt to society. Providing robots with the ability to learn from observing human behavior has, thus, become an important topic of research in robotics. The rational is that the robot’s ability to imitate would offer a natural means of programming the robot, that would require none or minimal programming competence on the user’s part. Robot learning by imitation, also known as robot programming through demonstration, finds its use for a large number of tasks, such as object manipulation [13], [16], learning body motions [2], [8], [15], navigation [5], [10] and learning communication skills [4].

Robot toys are the most likely application of social robots in the near future [9]. Being cheap to build and likeable by a large part of the population, robot toys offer an ideal platform to test algorithms for social learning. Robota, a doll-shaped robot toy, was developed with the goal investigating what social skills would be required for a human-shaped robot to engage in believable social interactions [1]. Robota is currently being used in pilot studies with normal and cognitively impaired children, and with children with autism. The studies aim at developing Robota as a complementary educational tool that would guide the children through games that rehearse school material. In studies with autistic children, Robota is particularly interesting to educators as a means to systematically evaluate the child’s social competences.

While the above-mentioned studies have been reported elsewhere [3], [6], the present paper focuses on the novel application of Robota as a laboratory platform in an introductory class to robotics taught at the undergraduate level. The class uses a set of 10 Robota robots. The class revolves around lab sessions during which the students learn to program the robot’s micro-controller and the robot–PC interface, using both vision and speech synthesizing. The lab sessions aim at the development of games suitable for normal and disabled children.

Section 2 describes briefly the hardware of the Robota robots and the applications of Robota as a toy for children. Section 3 describes the application of Robota in an undergraduate robotics class. 4 Discussion: key features required for social robots, 5 Conclusion conclude this paper with a discussion of the choice of providing Robota with human-like features, vision and speech interfaces and how these can, in some cases, be important components for building social skills in a robot.