Publications related to Personal robot

Teacher's Perception on Social Robots to Promote the Integration of Children with Migration Background

Arzu Güneysu Özgür, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore

This paper describes the first steps of an ongoing participatory design with teachers from Switzerland to co-create Human-Robot Interaction setups for integrating children with migration history. The herein presented phase had two main goals: (i) initially ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

Immediate effects of short-duration wellbeing practices on children’s handwriting and posture guided by a social robot

Pierre Dillenbourg, Chenyang Wang, Barbara Bruno, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore, Melike Cezayirlioglu

Handwriting practising, as any other repetitive task, often leads the practiser to an overconcentration state where their performance might be affected by postural and mental fatigue. Short breaks to perform unrelated activities, especially relaxation exer ...

2023

Participatory design of a social robot and robot-mediated storytelling activity to raise awareness of gender inequality among children

Barbara Bruno, Romain Maure

Gender inequality is a widespread problem in our society. It can manifest itself in many ways and contexts, and starting as early as primary school. While an increasing number of initiatives aim at tackling gender biases and inequalities, few of them are a ...

IEEE2023

Computational Models of Mutual Understanding for Human-Robot Collaborative Learning

Utku Norman

There is a growing trend towards designing learning activities featuring robots as collaborative exercises where children work together to achieve the activity objectives, generating interactions that can trigger learning processes. Witnessing such activit ...

EPFL2023

Language Learning using Caption Generation within Reciprocal Multi-Party Child-Tutor-Tutee Interaction

Barbara Bruno

Reciprocal Peer Tutoring (RPT) is a learning paradigm characteristic of collaborative interaction between learners with alternating tutortutee roles. In recent years, robot-assisted language learning (RALL) has gained traction by its wide application for l ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2023

Reinforcement learning for scaffold-free construction of spanning-structures

Maryam Kamgarpour, Stefana Parascho, Gabriel Rémi Vallat, Anna Maria Maddux, Jingwen Wang

In construction robotics, a conventional design-to-fabrication work-flow starts with designing a structure, followed by task and robotic motion planning, and ultimately, fabrication. However, this approach can prove unsuccessful, as we may only discover th ...

New York2023

The iReCheck project: using tablets and robots for personalised handwriting practice

Pierre Dillenbourg, Chenyang Wang, Barbara Bruno, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore, David Cohen

Handwriting is an important skill in children development as well as in education that take years to be mastered. While keyboards and similar technological devices increasingly become more popular, new tools and engaging approaches are also required to kee ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

The science of soft robot design: A review of motivations, methods and enabling technologies

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Novel technologies, fabrication methods, controllers and computational methods are rapidly advancing the capabilities of soft robotics. This is creating the need for design techniques and methodologies that are suited for the multi-disciplinary nature of s ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023

Introducing Productive Engagement for Social Robots Supporting Learning

Jauwairia Nasir

We have all been one such student or seen such students who can maintain the 'good student' image while playing a video game under the table or those loyal backbenchers, seemingly always distracted, who then ace their exams. These intricacies of human beha ...

EPFL2022

A game-based approach for evaluating and customizing handwriting training using an autonomous social robot

Pierre Dillenbourg, Chenyang Wang, Barbara Bruno, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore

Handwriting learning is a long and complex process that takes about ten years to be fully mastered. Nearly one-third of all children aged 4-12 experiences handwriting difficulties and, sadly, most of them are left to fight them on their own, due to the sca ...

IEEE2022

Social/dialogical roles of social robots in supporting children's learning of language and literacy-A review and analysis of innovative roles

Barbara Bruno

One of the many purposes for which social robots are designed is education, and there have been many attempts to systematize their potential in this field. What these attempts have in common is the recognition that learning can be supported in a variety of ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

A Case for the Design of Attention and Gesture Systems for Social Robots

Barbara Bruno, Utku Norman, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore, Romain Maure, Erik Alessandro Wengle

The success of social robots, even (or, especially) in use cases as simple as "manning" a booth to promote a product in a shopping mall, depends on their ability of interacting with humans in a timely, effective and enjoyable way. In this paper we present ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2022

A Noise-Resistant Mixed-Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for the Automatic Design of Robotic Controllers

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann

The automatic design of well-performing robotic controllers is still an unsolved problem due to the inherently large parameter space and noisy, often hard-to-define performance metrics, especially when sequential tasks need to be accomplished. Distal contr ...

2022

Do Children Adapt Their Perspective to a Robot When They Fail to Complete a Task?

Pierre Dillenbourg, Elmira Yadollahi, Ana Paiva

Spatial understanding and communication are essential skills in human interaction. An adequate understanding of others' spatial perspectives can increase the quality of the interaction, both perceptually and cognitively. In this paper, we take the first st ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2022

Dual Stiffness Tensegrity Platform for Resilient Robotics

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Yi Sun, Davide Zappetti

Collision resilience is an important feature of robots deployed in unstructured and partially unpredictable environments. Herein, a novel dual stiffness (DS) tensegrity platform to integrate collision resilience into a robot body is proposed. The proposed ...

2022

Tales from a Robotic World. How Intelligent Machines Will Shape Our Future

Dario Floreano, Nicola Nosengo

Stories from the future of intelligent machines—from rescue drones to robot spouses—and accounts of cutting-edge research that could make it all possible. Tech prognosticators promised us robots—autonomous humanoids that could carry out any number of tasks ...

MIT Press2022

A Social Robot That Looks For Productive Engagement

Pierre Dillenbourg, Barbara Bruno, Jauwairia Nasir

In educational HRI, it is generally believed that a robots behavior has a direct effect on the engagement of a user with the robot, the task at hand and also their partner in case of a collaborative activity. Increasing this engagement is then held respons ...

2021

“It Is Not the Robot Who Learns, It Is Me.” Treating Severe Dysgraphia Using Child–Robot Interaction

Pierre Dillenbourg, Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, David Cohen

Writing disorders are frequent and impairing. However, social robots may help to improve children's motivation and to propose enjoyable and tailored activities. Here, we have used the Co-writer scenario in which a child is asked to teach a robot how to wri ...

2021

Children, Robots, and Virtual Agents: Present and Future Challenges

Shruti Chandra, Elmira Yadollahi

Research on child-agent interaction is rapidly expanding. It is, therefore, necessary to converge our collective efforts to broaden our understanding and perspectives of how virtual agents, affect and potentially improve the well-being of children. "Childr ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2021

What if Social Robots look for Productive Engagement?

Pierre Dillenbourg, Barbara Bruno, Jauwairia Nasir

In educational HRI, it is generally believed that a robots behavior has a direct effect on the engagement of a user with the robot, the task at hand and also their partner in case of a collaborative activity. Increasing this engagement is then held respons ...

2022