PRE2016 3 Groep6

Roxanne Boehlé, Bo Drummen, Jolijn Hesen, Rachel Roumans, Sietske Wijffels, Fenna Wit

Project Robots Everywhere

For the final course of the use learning trajectory of Robots Everywhere students work in groups to create a robot design. Combining scientific knowledge with social knowledge and taking into accound the USE aspects, it is a perfect application to finish with.

Problem
Our group acknowledged that therapy for autism based on robot is developing rapedly. For these therapies different kinds of robots are used and each robot has another approach. Autistic people take a look at the world differently. They have a mysterious complex impairment in social interaction and communication.
Children with autism struggle with social skills. A robot would be a good solution, because they have infinite patience and do not judge.

Project
In this project we want to face the state of art of this sort of autism therapy specialised for children.
We want to study possibilities in helping these autistic children. We want to get a clear view of what a robot can do for autistic children by analysing existing robots and other autism research, keeping user and society in mind.

Week 1

In week 1 we got the first lecture of the course. During the lecture an overview of the course was given. Then, groups were formed and during our first meeting we brainstormed about possible robot technologies we could use as our subject. We created a mindmap with several branches of interest. After eliminating most of them, were hesitating between robots for children with autism, robots for rehabilitation purposes and a persuasive dieting robot.
We ended up choosing robots for children with autism. At the end of the meeting we scheduled another meeting for which each of us had to come prepared by looking up literature on our topic.

During the second meeting we further elaborated on the subject. Where we wanted to go and what we already knew about current technologies involving children with autism. We talked about our objectives and the approach.

Our main objective is to make sure children with autism can smoothly integrate in society, by improving their social skills with the help of robots.

objective 1; Recognize facial expressions

objective 2; Achieve skills in teamwork

objective 3; Responding appropriately to different kinds of behaviors

: :objective 3.1; Turn taking
: :objective 3.2; Gaze behavior
: :objective 3.3; Show interest

objective 4; Adapt to changes in the environment

Our approach containes doing literature research to see what is out there and what not, mostly focusing on what is not.
Then, we plan to talk to specialists and/or parents with children with autism, to see what is needed or what they would look for in a robot.
If possible, we would like to integrate these needs in a game which could be programmed in a robot.
Lastly, we made records during our meeting containing the things we talked about as well as bullet points of the tasks each of us had to do for the next week. Among other things, this consisted of making the presentation, writing the first part for the wiki, get in contact with specialists and think of future planning.

Week 2

State of the Art

ZECA: Displays facial expressions
WikiTherapist: Embodied interaction for improving social skills
FACE: Expresses emotional information
Robot Bandit Project: HRI in natural way, verbal
KASPAR: Predictable and repetitive communication
Kismet: Visual and auditory social cues
Leka: Uses expressions, sound, light to interact
Zeno: Expressive face, focused on emotions

Deliverables

Via our literature study, we wanted to find out the things that already exist and which things are missing in the research field. We found out that there are already several robots that help children to learn to recognize facial expressions or that learn children how to react on different kinds of behavior. We concluded that another important social skill that autistic children find hard to develop is teamwork and that robots could help them during the development of this social skill. So this is the social skill we will focus on.

Now we will interview specialists in this field to gather more information about the topic and finally we want to create our own game with Nao that can help autistic children to develop their teamwork skill.

Appendix

Planning

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Week 1
- Brainstorm with the project group
- Define our subject, objectives and approach
- Prepare the presentation of week 2.

Week 2
- Present our subject, objectives, approach
- Dive into literature about our subject
- Create a planning, define milestones, deliverables and make a task division.
- Prepare the presentation of week 3

Week 3
- Process the information found in literature
- Present the planning, milestones, deliverables, task division
- Plan interviews
- Set up the interview
- Start with the design of the game

Week 4
- Interview the specialists
- Analys the interviews
- Work on the design of the game

Week 5
- Work on the design of the game

Week 6
- Write the report
- Realise the design

Week 7
- Finish the report
- Realise the design

Week 8
- Final presentation