Publications associées à ”Roteco” - a Swiss teacher community for educational robotics

Supporting Teachers' Orchestration in Robot-mediated Classrooms

To bring educational robots to classrooms, we need to consider teachers' self-efficacy and challenges in managing a robot-mediated classroom, and how to support them in overcoming these challenges. Orchestration tools are designed to support teachers by pr ...

EPFL2023

Co-constructing an Effective, Sustainable and Scalable Primary School Computer Science Curricular Reform

Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy

Over the past few decades, the debates have shifted from whether to how Computer Science (CS) should be introduced into formal education. Given the diverse ways to introduce CS into formal education, and the struggles many countries have faced, considerabl ...

EPFL2023

Smell Driven Navigation for Soft Robotic Arms: Artificial Nose and Control

Egidio Falotico, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Elephants and other animals heavily rely on the sense of smell to operate. Soft robots would also benefit from an artificial sense of smell, which could be helpful in typical soft robotic tasks such as search and rescue, pipe inspection, and all the tasks ...

IEEE2023

Self-Correcting Quadratic Programming-Based Robot Control

Aude Billard, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis, Farshad Khadivar

Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...

2023

How are primary school computer science curricular reforms contributing to equity? Impact on student learning, perception of the discipline, and gender gaps

Francesco Mondada, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Barbara Bruno

Background Early exposure to Computer Science (CS) and Computational Thinking (CT) for all is critical to broaden participation and promote equity in the field. But how does the introduction of CS and CT into primary school curricula impact learning, perce ...

2023

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

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

Morphological flexibility in robotic systems through physical polygon meshing

Jamie Paik, Christoph Heinrich Belke, Kevin Andrew Holdcroft, Alexander Thomas Sigrist

Shape-changing robots adapt their own morphology to address a wider range of functions or environments than is possible with a fixed or rigid structure. Akin to biological organisms, the ability to alter shape or configuration emerges from the underlying m ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Exploration-based model learning with self-attention for risk-sensitive robot control

Sudong Lee

Model-based reinforcement learning for robot control offers the advantages of overcoming concerns on data collection and iterative processes for policy improvement in model-free methods. However, both methods use exploration strategy relying on heuristics ...

2023

Sensorless force and displacement estimation in soft actuators

Jamie Paik, Sagar Dattatray Joshi

Sensing forms an integral part of soft matter based robots due to their compliance, dependence on loading conditions, and virtually infinite degrees of freedom. Previous studies have developed several extrinsic sensors and embedded them into soft actuators ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

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

Implicit Distance Functions: Learning and Applications in Robotics

Mikhail Koptev

In this thesis, we address the complex issue of collision avoidance in the joint space of robots. Avoiding collisions with both the robot's own body parts and obstacles in the environment is a critical constraint in motion planning and is crucial for ensur ...

EPFL2023

Identifying important sensory feedback for learning locomotion skills

Auke Ijspeert, Milad Shafiee Ashtiani, Guillaume Denis Antoine Bellegarda

Robot motor skills can be acquired by deep reinforcement learning as neural networks to reflect state-action mapping. The selection of states has been demonstrated to be crucial for successful robot motor learning. However, because of the complexity of neu ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Enabling four-arm laparoscopic surgery by controlling two robotic assistants via haptic foot interfaces

Mohamed Bouri, Aude Billard, Walid Amanhoud, Jacob Hernandez Sanchez

Robotic surgery is a promising direction to improve surgeons and assistants’ daily life with respect to conventional surgery. In this work, we propose solo laparoscopic surgery in which two robotic arms, controlled via haptic foot interfaces, assist the ta ...

2023

How to support teachers to carry out educational robotics activities in school? The case of Roteco, the Swiss robotic teacher community

Sophia Reyes Mury

The development of 21st-century transversal competences such as communication, cooperation, and creativity as well as computational thinking and programming may be aided through educational robotics (ER). Different countries have inserted ER in their schoo ...

2022

A case for co-construction with teachers in curricular reform: Introducing computer science in primary school

Francesco Mondada, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Barbara Bruno, Helena Kovacs

With the introduction of Computer Science (CS) into curricula worldwide, researchers have investigated whether CS could be introduced transversally, as a support other disciplines. Few however consider both student learning and the teachers’ perspective in ...

ACM2022

Mediating Computational Thinking Through Educational Robotics In Primary School

Morgane Solène Denise Chevalier

Nowadays, computational thinking (CT) is considered a skill to be taught. While educational robotics (ER) appears promising to foster students' CT, operational CT frameworks and explicit guidance in ER are lacking. This thesis thus proposes to understand h ...

EPFL2022

Dataset for the publication "The TACS Model: Understanding Teachers' Adoption of Computer Science Pedagogical Content in Primary School"

Francesco Mondada, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Frédérique Michèle Chessel-Lazzarotto, Barbara Bruno

This dataset contains the quantitative teacher data used to analyse an in service teacher training program for Computer Science that took place from September 2019 to March 2020 in the Canton Vaud in Switzerland. Approximately 180 teachers from the the 5th ...

2022

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

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

Pierre Dillenbourg, Ana Paiva, Elmira Yadollahi

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