Related papers: Promoting scientific thinking with robots
Animals have remarkable abilities to adapt locomotion to different terrains and tasks. However, robots trained by means of reinforcement learning are typically able to solve only a single task and a transferred policy is usually inferior to…
As artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in our society and global economy, AI education and literacy have become necessary components in college and K-12 education to prepare students for an AI-powered…
Contemporary robots are increasingly mimicking human social behaviours to facilitate interaction, such as smiling to signal approachability, or hesitating before taking an action to allow people time to react. Such techniques can activate a…
Meeting eye contact is the essential prerequisite skill of a human to initiate any conversation with others. However, it is not an easy task for a robot to meet eye contact with a human if they are not facing each other initially or the…
Research in child-robot interactions suggests that engaging in "care-taking" of a social robot, such as tucking the robot in at night, can strengthen relationships formed between children and robots. In this work, we aim to better…
For successful deployment of robots in multifaceted situations, an understanding of the robot for its environment is indispensable. With advancing performance of state-of-the-art object detectors, the capability of robots to detect objects…
Typical educational robotics approaches rely on imperative programming for robot navigation. However, with the increasing presence of AI in everyday life, these approaches miss an opportunity to introduce machine learning (ML) techniques…
The visual world is very rich and generally too complex to perceive in its entirety. Yet only certain features are typically required to adequately perform some task in a given situation. Rather than hardwire-in decisions about when and…
We present aspects of the deployment of a remotely operable telescope for teaching practical science to distance learning undergraduate students. We briefly describe the technical realization of the facility, PIRATE, in Mallorca and…
In this paper, we present a pilot study aiming to investigate the challenges of teaching AI and Robotics to children in low- and middle-income countries. Challenges such as the little to none experts and the limited resources in a Mexican…
This paper describes ROBOTIKANDO, a web application for supporting both kindergarten teachers in planning educational robotics activities and educational robotics experts who would like to share their knowledge and experience. ROBOTIKANDO…
Socialization is an essential development skill for preschool children. In collaboration with the LEGO Group, we developed Robert Robot, a simplified robot, which enables socialization between children and facilitates shared experiences…
Robots are required to autonomously respond to changing situations. Imitation learning is a promising candidate for achieving generalization performance, and extensive results have been demonstrated in object manipulation. However,…
This paper shows the potential of a Lego\c{opyright} based low-cost commercial robotic platform for learning and testing prototypes in higher education and research. The overall setup aims to explain mobile robotic issues strongly related…
In this paper we present an open source educational robot, designed both to engage children in an affective and social interaction, and to be programmable also in its social and affective behaviour. Indeed the robot, in addition to classic…
This paper describes a new research project that aims to develop a social robot designed to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. While robots have previously been trialled for this task,…
In recent years, there is an increasing interest in high school robotics extracurriculars such as robotics clubs and robotics competitions. The growing demand is a result of more ubiquitous open-source software and affordable off-the-shelf…
We discuss the development of interactive video tutorial-based problems to help introductory physics students learn effective problem solving heuristics. The video tutorials present problem solving strategies using concrete examples in an…
Purpose - Most industrial robots are still programmed using the typical teaching process, through the use of the robot teach pendant. This is a tedious and time-consuming task that requires some technical expertise, and hence new approaches…
In social robotics, robots needs to be able to be understood by humans. Especially in collaborative tasks where they have to share mutual knowledge. For instance, in an educative scenario, learners share their knowledge and they must adapt…