Coaching Questions Group 4

To help your group and the teachers prepare for the tutor meetings, we would like you to answer a few questions in between sessions. The following paragraphs list the questions for each of the weeks, please write you answers directly underneath the questions.

After the kick-off - Week 1

• What are you expecting to learn during the Robots course?
  • How to set up a project
  • Setting realistic goals
  • Interdisciplinary collaboration
  • How people want to interact with a guide robot at a museum
  • If there is a suitable robot for the task
  • If yes, how to develop for this robot
  • Developing an actual (part of a) robot

• What kind of coaching do you expect?

We expect to get feedback on what we are doing, get answers/questions to our questions to guide us in the right direction, help us to (keep) focus.

• What kind of coaching would you prefer?

See above.

• What will the coaches expect of you?

They will expect us to take initiative, and also take responsibility for the project and its process.

After the first tutor meeting - Week 2

• What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?

Define a ‘useful conversation’, this will help us to know what we want to develop, and guide us in developing the robot. We also have a clearer view of the specific direction we want to take in this project.

• How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?

We now know that we should focus on a more specific part of the tour robot. This is why we decided to put focus on having a “useful conversation” with the robot (and we work on this exact definition).

• What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?
  • We did further research on the state of the art, focusing on the specific focus that we now know we are considering.
  • We made a new broad planning for the rest of the project.
  • We did research on how to program for the Pepper robot
  • We have contacted Margot Neggers to ask her about the Pepper robot

We are still having some trouble with the exact state of the art when it comes to the focus of our project, being the conversation between a robot and a human. Because of this, it is difficult to estimate how long some tasks will take and what is feasible to do in the given timeframe.

• What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?
  • We more clearly defined a 'meaningful conversation'
  • We constructed a list of questions and topics on which we would like to request some guidance.

After the second tutor meeting - Week 3

• What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?

Make everything concrete. Only then we will be able to make this project a success. We need to know what we want to do and where we want to put our focus on in order to move forward. We need to further specify our target group, make an example conversation, and update the scenarios, etc. to the new plan. Also, we need to specify the tasks in the planning better.

• How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?

After the meeting we immediately discussed what our target group would be, in more detail, we further elaborated the planning, and divided ourselves over the tasks we now think need to be done. We made it all more concrete and that gave us a better idea of what to do next.

• What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?
  • We had a meeting with Margot and got to see Pepper and its abilities. She explained us how to use Pepper and how to program Pepper. This meeting helped a lot as we now know what Pepper is capable of already and how we can make progress.
  • We also contacted two museums. We asked them if we could visit them and ask them some questions. Since, we didn't get a response yet, we will go visit them next week.
  • We further elaborated the planning and updated the wiki (vision, scenario's, persona's, objectives, etc.) to where we are at right now
  • We started getting to know the program Choregraphe to be able to start programming the dialogue next week
  • We contacted TechUnited to make reservations for using Pepper

• What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?

We updated the wiki to where we are right now. We made a new planning. We would like to discuss our plans and we look forward to hear your ideas on them.

After the third tutor meeting - Week 4

• What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?

We need to find out what the underlying model of the program Choregraph is. This will help us to understand what is possible within the program and what is not. And we need to try to program the dialogue in such a way that it can be reused but in a different context. So, that we we wouldn't have to fully write a complete conversation but that pieces of preprogrammed dialogue can be reused in a different context. It is also wise to write all we learned of the underlying model, in summary, on the wiki and to make a part of the wiki some kind of tuturial as this is also a possible end product.

• How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?

We did more research on the program Choregraph and made a tutorial about how to use the program in a step-by-step manner. We are still figuring out how to reuse parts in a different context.

• What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?

We did more research on the program Choregraph and we made a tutorial about it. We went to visit the Van Abbemuseum and gained a lot of useful information. Using the information we gained from the Van Abbemuseum, we thought of a lot of possible questions and answers that Pepper should ask and respond to. And we started programming a conversation.

• What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?

We want to discuss our progress.

After the fourth tutor meeting - Week 5

• What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?

We learned that we should think about which paintings/artworks we should choose, and that we should think about the personal conversation (robot with user) that decides how the tour will go. We should also think about the way we will test and present this model.

• How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?

We reconsidered the decisions of the paintings, and we worked a lot on the design of the personal conversation. We also thought about the way we want to present and test our model, although, we have not made a final decision yet.

• What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?

We worked on the personal conversation, and the making of a decision of a personal tour. We also met Pepper. Monday, we tested some code that we had already written, but we had a lot of problems. In the midweek, we tried to fix these problems and thursday we met Pepper again and tested some other code. A lot of the earlier problems were fixed here, to our relief. We also wrote down which things we needed to do, and will continue to improve our program next week. We also made the dialogue options and possibilities more concrete, and worked on the example-conversations. We also made a fact-sheet about the artworks, so the data can be implemented easier.

• What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting?

We will mostly work on improving the code and making the dialogue options more specific. In this meeting, we want to discuss the possible concepts and things that pepper can do. Are the general questions a good cover of the context? and what are good things to add in the conversation about the artwork?

After the fifth tutor meeting - Week 6

• What is the most interesting thing you learned in the coaching meeting of the previous week and why?

We mostly learned information about the final presentation, what is expected and this gave us a lot of insight of how we should prepare for this presentation. We mostly learned that we can't tell everything that happened, so we need to make a selection of what we want to tell. We also learned that we need to take in mind that the audience is our fellow students, who don't know anything about our project yet. We also got more insight about the planning of this final week. We made the division in different tasks more specific and clear, which helped us to get a better vision about our work for the next week.

• How did you incorporate coaches' feedback of the previous meeting in your project?

A point of feedback was that we had to think of the way we wanted to present our "product". So in the next meeting, we brainstormed about the possibilities and discussed what way of presenting helped to show what we have reached so far. We also started to think about which things we wanted to show in the other 10 minutes of the presentation. Which things are worth to notice? Which things do we want to show? How do we make the audience excited about our project?

• What new activities did you undertake during this week? What did you learn from these activities?

As said above, we discussed the way of presenting our product, and we thought of the structure/content of our final presentation. We learned that is it very important to both make the audience excited / draw their attention, but that we also need to give enough information, because the audience doesn't have any prior knowledge about our project. We also worked a lot on improving the code, and making Pepper more flexible in situations. We learned that Pepper should be able to recognise a lot of responses/answers, and that we need to make pauses in the sentences of Pepper to give them a more natural language. We also looked at the user guide given by SoftBank robotics, and found a lot of things that can/need to be improved of Pepper. All of the improvement/decisions can be found in the wiki. All these improvements and decision gave us more insight of how Pepper should act in this world, and how Pepper should act towards its users.

• What did you do to prepare for next week's meeting next week?

We prepared everything for the final presentation and the demonstration. This includes a PowerPoint, the presenters who know what they need to tell, and a video clip with Pepper giving a tour in a museum. We also planned a meeting where we will reflect on the presentation, and make final arrangements about finishing the wiki.

After the final presentation - Week 7

• What are the major steps of the project? Please list.
  • Decisions
    • Focus on dialogue between robot and user
    • Focus on dialogue between robot and user between the age of 18-30 years
    • Make use of Pepper robot to program the dialogue
    • Personal dialogue
  • Major steps
    • First visit Pepper
    • Visit Van Abbemuseum
    • First bit of dialogue of Pepper
    • First conversation with Pepper
    • Personal touch to conversation with Pepper

• What is the most important thing you learned in this project? (e.g .about design or working in groups, etc)

The most important thing we learned in this project is to be very specific in the decisions you make and to be as concrete as possible at the beginning of the project. Only then you will be able to start the project and end the project with a feasible end product. We had difficulties with this and so we started off with a broad subject and therefore had difficulties in knowing what we should do next or what we would even be able to produce in such a short time. So, during the meetings we learned we had to be as concrete as possible and making decisions on small aspects of the project so we could start quickly.

• What do you wish you had spent more time on or done differently?

If we had known this earlier, being concrete and making decisions as early on as possible, we possibly wouldn't have lost the first three weeks. In these three weeks we didn't really know where to start, how to get to the end product or even what we would be able to do in such a short period of time. If we would have known this earlier we possibly could have used this time more effectively instead of using it not really knowing what we were doing. Also, if we had made our decisions earlier, we could have met Pepper earlier and visited the Van Abbemuseum earlier, so we possibly could have done tests with Pepper or be able to make the dialogue even more personal. Because of the time we 'lost' while starting up, we were now not able to test with users or make Pepper easily implementable for all kinds of musuems. So, this is now future possible work.

• What was the most enjoyable part of this project? Please explain why

The most enjoyable part of this project is that we actually made something out of nothing. At the beginning, we had no idea what we could do in such a short period of time, but in this short period of time we were able to get familiar with programming Pepper, being able to program Pepper as we intended it to function, and finally being able to have a conversation with Pepper. What surprised us the most is the level with which we can already talk with Pepper. The dialogue you can have with Pepper is pretty sophisticated already, as well as personal, and natural. At the start of the project, none of us thought we were able to program Pepper to have this level of a dialogue with humans.

• What was the least enjoyable part of this project? Please explain why

The least enjoyable part of this project was the problems we ran into while programming Pepper. We initially had problems in speech recognition, or Pepper not answering correctly. Issues like this, kept coming up and made the programming difficult.