NRI: Socially Aware, Expressive, and Personalized Mobile Remote Presence: Co-Robots as Gateways to Access to K-12 In-School Education
The NRI project focused on developing control algorithms for mobile remote presence (MRP) co-robot systems that improved human access to a learning/training environment, focusing on homebound K-12 students, but with general implications to users of all ages and a variety of contexts. Participating in the school environment is essential to children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development and learning. It had long been recognized that the quality of a student’s school experience is important not only for academic and achievement outcomes, but for fostering self-esteem, self-confidence, and general psychological well-being. Yet annually 26.6% of America’s children had health or behavioral challenges that cause them to miss significant amounts of school, and 13% of all US K-12 public school students received interventions due to learning disabilities or emotional disturbances. Using co-robot systems for access to K-12 classrooms for homebound students may be a powerful gateway for minimizing the effects of physical separation from the school environment. However, co-robot systems were limited in effectiveness due to a lack of socially appropriate, expressive, and personalized capabilities. This project developed methods that enabled the creation of personalizable controllers for shared autonomy, socially appropriate movement, and socially expressive nonverbal communication for co-robot systems in dynamic K-12 class settings.
Moreover, the impact of this NRI project spanned K-12 education at large, but also applied to general uses of mobile remote presence systems outside of the classroom setting, for both education and training. In addition, the project connected the research themes with outreach; it engaged K-12 students and teachers in co-robot-themed activities and held annual NRI-themed workshops at large-scale public venues. The broader outreach program was designed to train students in STEM, so they can become not only end users of robotics and other technologies but capable of developing such technologies themselves, thereby contributing to the US STEM workforce.
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Investigators: Maja Mataric and Gisele Ragusa, University of Southern California