Related papers: Promoting scientific thinking with robots
We present and evaluate a prototype social robot to encourage daily exercise among older adults in a home setting. Our prototype system, designed to lead users through exercise sessions with motivational feedback, was assessed through a…
The objectives of physics laboratory courses include fostering conceptual understanding and development of several important cognitive, psycho-motor, attitudinal and affective abilities. In most of the Indian colleges and universities (and…
As a response to the trends of the increasing importance of computational approaches and the accelerating pace in science, I propose in this position paper to establish the concept of "science bots" that autonomously perform programmed…
In 2020, I designed the course CMSC 20630/30630 Human-Robot Interaction: Research and Practice as a hands-on introduction to human-robot interaction (HRI) research for both undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Chicago.…
Knowledge and skills can transfer from human teachers to human students. However, such direct transfer is often not scalable for physical tasks, as they require one-to-one interaction, and human teachers are not available in sufficient…
Interactive Task Learning (ITL) is an emerging research agenda that studies the design of complex intelligent robots that can acquire new knowledge through natural human teacher-robot learner interactions. ITL methods are particularly…
The sense of family connectedness may support positive outcomes including individual well-being, resilience, and healthy family functioning. However, as technologies advance, they often replace human-human interactions instead of nurturing…
We consider problems in which robots conspire to present a view of the world that differs from reality. The inquiry is motivated by the problem of validating robot behavior physically despite there being a discrepancy between the robots we…
This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among human interactors--the…
Safe human-robot interactions require robots to be able to learn how to behave appropriately in \sout{humans' world} \rev{spaces populated by people} and thus to cope with the challenges posed by our dynamic and unstructured environment,…
Autonomous robots operating in open and changing environments cannot always rely on predefined inputs, outputs, and action routines. Although existing learning methods enable robots to improve their performance through environmental…
This study examines the impact of a remote laboratory experiment on Physics learning, using a case study approach. Societal advancements over the past century have spurred discussions regarding restructuring the current educational system,…
Metarobotics aims to combine next generation wireless communication, multi-sense immersion, and collective intelligence to provide a pervasive, itinerant, and non-invasive access and interaction with distant robotized applications. Industry…
The use of social robots as instruments for social mediation has been gaining traction in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). So far, the design of such robots and their behaviors is often driven by technological platforms and…
What if we take a broader view of what it means to run an education experiment? In this paper, we explore opportunities that arise when we think beyond the commonly-held notion that the purpose of an experiment is to either accept or reject…
In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as…
This paper presents UAIbot, a free and open-source web-based robotics simulator designed to address the educational and research challenges conventional simulation platforms generally face. The Python and JavaScript interfaces of UAIbot…
Robots interacting with the physical world plan with models of physics. We advocate that robots interacting with people need to plan with models of cognition. This writeup summarizes the insights we have gained in integrating computational…
Imitation learning has been commonly applied to solve different tasks in isolation. This usually requires either careful feature engineering, or a significant number of samples. This is far from what we desire: ideally, robots should be…
Swarm Robotics is an emerging field of adapting the phenomenon of natural swarms to robotics. It is a study of robots that are aimed to mimic natural swarms, like ants and birds, to form a system that is scalable, flexible, and robust.…