RekenRobot: Assisting primary school teachers in arithmetic education

A large problem that primary schools face is that the ratio of pupils to teachers is too high, the class sizes are too large and this makes it difficult for a single teacher to have a good oversight of how the development of a given child is going. The aim of Interactive Robotics is to tackle this problem by bringing robots into the classroom to...

Adaptive feedback by a humanoid robot tutoring math

Schools and other educational instances (such as: elementary, primary and secondary schools, schools for applied sciences and universities) are making use of new innovations and technologies to help teachers and students. <br/>After Smart Boards, computers, and tablets, a new field of research arises: can robots in any way help in teaching?...

Affect expression in social robots: Combining non-verbal affect expression techniques

With the advent of social robots which are designed to be 'social', human-like interactions have become a necessity. It is natural for us to use a plethora of emotions to convey additional information or to make an interaction more engaging. But emotion expression is not commonly associated with robots. Many humanoid robots cannot generate...

Question answering with the RoboTutor Nao

This thesis project worked towards extending the interactive capabilities of the RoboTutor Nao, by enabling it to answers natural language questions about topics such as computers, robots and the Nao itself. The main questions we focused on were 1) what a system for answering questions in Dutch and intended for elementary school age children...

Musical NAO: Instrument Playing Humanoid Using Monocular Vision

Humanoid robots are becoming part of modern societies mainly involving the education and entertainment fields. Therefore, providing techniques that enable a humanoid to autonomously play instruments like the metallophone we enrich its usefulness. <br/><br/>In this work we present an approach for making humanoid robot NAO play the metallophone....

Designing robot behavior to stimulate self-disclosure of introverted and extraverted children during an initial interaction

The purpose of this thesis is to design robot behavior that stimulates self-disclosure of introverted and extraverted children during an initial interaction. This was done by designing two styles of robot behavior. One behavior style that was specifically adapted to introverted children and one behavior style that was specifically adapted to...

Socially-Aware Navigation: Guiding Behavior with Pepper

Socially-aware robot navigation strives to find efficient methods to autonomously navigate known environments while incorporating social metrics derived from human behavior. Several methods built for navigation on dynamic and uncertain environments have been adapted to resemble human navigation, but fail to appropriately reflect the social...

Eliciting user engagement with a social robot: Drawing attention techniques for Pepper

The elicitation of user engagement is one of the current challenges of human-robot interaction, alongside with the identification of appropriate metrics to evaluate users' experience. Several studies focused on strategies aimed at maintaining engagement throughout an interaction, but limited research has been done on how to initiate it by...

Automation mechanisms for market models: Case study to reduce cultural discrimination in energy trading

The energy markets are emerging slowly towards a more decentralized form, e.g. technologies are allowing prosumers to trade energy from their solar house rooftops. But as these markets are governed by people and depend on the behavior of people directly, they are susceptible to challenges from the social, economic and cultural norms around the...