Abstract
Robots are gradually but steadily being introduced in our daily lives. A paramount application is that of education, where robots can assume the role of a tutor, a peer or simply a tool to help learners in a specific knowledge domain. Such endeavor posits specific challenges: affective social behavior, proper modelling of the learner’s progress, discrimination of the learner’s utterances, expressions and mental states, which, in turn, require an integrated architecture combining perception, cognition and action. In this paper we present an attempt to improve the current state of robots in the educational domain by introducing the EASEL EU project. Specifically, we introduce the EASEL’s unified robot architecture, an innovative Synthetic Tutor Assistant (STA) whose goal is to interactively guide learners in a science-based learning paradigm, allowing us to achieve such rich multimodal interactions.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Han, J.-H., Jo, M.-H., Jones, V., Jo, J.-H.: Comparative study on the educational use of home robots for children. J. Inf. Process. Syst. 4(4), 159–168 (2008)
Beer, R.D., Chiel, H.J., Drushel, R.F.: Using autonomous robotics to teach science and engineering. Commun. ACM 42(6), 85–92 (1999)
Mondada, F., Bonani, M., Raemy, X., Pugh, J., Cianci, C., Klaptocz, A., Magnenat, S., Zufferey, J.-C., Floreano, D., Martinoli, A.: The e-puck, a robot designed for education in engineering. In: Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems, Competitions, vol. 1, pp. 59–65. Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco (2009)
Wijnen, F., Charisi, V., Davison, D., van der Meij, J., Reidsma, D., Evers, V.: Inquiry learning with a social robot: can you explain that to me? In: Heerink, M., de Jong, M. (eds.) Proceedings of New Friends 2015: The 1st international conference on social robotics in therapy and education, pp. 24–25, Windesheim Flevoland, Almere (2015)
Kanda, T., Hirano, T., Eaton, D., Ishiguro, H.: Interactive robots as social partners and peer tutors for children: a field trial. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 19(1), 61–84 (2004)
Saerbeck, M., Schut, T., Bartneck, C., Janse, M.D.: Expressive robots in education: varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1613–1622. ACM (2010)
Shin, N., Kim, S.: Learning about, from, with robots: students’ perspectives. In: The 16th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2007, pp. 1040–1045. IEEE (2007)
Vouloutsi, V., Munoz, M.B., Grechuta, K., Lallee, S., Duff, A., Llobet, J.-Y.P., Verschure, P.F.M.J.: A new biomimetic approach towards educational robotics: the distributed adaptive control of a synthetic tutor assistant. New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction, p. 22 (2015)
Blancas, M., Vouloutsi, V., Grechuta, K., Verschure, P.F.M.J.: Effects of the robot’s role on human-robot interaction in an educational scenario. In: Wilson, S.P., Verschure, P.F.M.J., Mura, A., Prescott, T.J. (eds.) Living Machines 2015. LNCS, vol. 9222, pp. 391–402. Springer, Heidelberg (2015)
Balch, T., et al.: Designing personal robots for education: hardware, software and curriculum. IEEE Pervasive Comput. 7(2), 5–9 (2008)
Highfield, K., Mulligan, J., Hedberg, J.: Early mathematics learning through exploration with programmable toys. In: Proceedings of the Joint Meeting of PME 32 and PME-NA, pp. 169–176. Citeseer (2008)
Mubin, O., Stevens, C.J., Shahid, S., Al Mahmud, A., Dong, J.-J.: A review of the applicability of robots in education. J. Technol. Educ. Learn. 1, 209–215 (2013)
Piaget, J., Inhelder, B.: The Psychology of the Child. Basic Books, New York (1972)
Papert, S., Harel, I.: Situating constructionism. Constructionism 36, 1–11 (1991)
Vygotsky, L.S.: Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (1980)
Charisi, V., Davison, D., Wijnen, F., Van Der Meij, J., Reidsma, D., Prescott, T., Van Joolingen, W., Evers, V.: Towards a child-robot symbiotic co-development: a theoretical approach. In: AISB Convention 2015, The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) (2015)
Verschure, P.F.M.J.: Distributed adaptive control: a theory of the mind, brain, body nexus. Biologically Inspired Cogn. Architectures 1, 55–72 (2012)
Verschure, P.F.M.J., Voegtlin, T., Douglas, R.J.: Environmentally mediated synergy between perception and behaviour in mobile robots. Nature 425, 620–624 (2003)
Verschure, P.F.M.J., Pennartz, C.M., Pezzulo, G.: The why, what, where, when and how of goal-directed choice: neuronal and computational principles. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 369(1655), 20130483 (2014)
Maffei, G., Santos-Pata, D., Marcos, E., Sánchez-Fibla, M., Verschure, P.F.M.J.: An embodied biologically constrained model of foraging: from classical and operant conditioning to adaptive real-world behavior in DAC-X. Neural Netw. 72, 88–108 (2015)
Kruger, J., Dunning, D.: Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 77(6), 1121 (1999)
Abramson, L.Y., Seligman, M.E., Teasdale, J.D.: Learned helplessness in humans: critique and reformulation. J. Abnorm. Psychol. 87(1), 49 (1978)
Seligman, M.E.: Learned helplessness. Annu. Rev. Med. 23(1), 407–412 (1972)
Inhelder, B., Piaget, J.: The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence: An Essay on the Construction of Formal Operational Structures. Basic Books, New York (1958)
Siegler, R.S.: Three aspects of cognitive development. Cogn. Psychol. 8(4), 481–520 (1976)
Siegler, R.S., Strauss, S., Levin, I.: Developmental sequences within and between concepts. Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev. 46, 631–683 (1981)
Metta, G., Fitzpatrick, P., Natale, L.: Yarp: yet another robot platform. Int. J. Adv. Rob. Syst. 3(1), 43–48 (2006)
Povey, D., Ghoshal, A., Boulianne, G., Burget, L., Glembek, O., Goel, N., Hannemann, M., Motlicek, P., Qian, Y., Schwarz, P., et al.: The kaldi speech recognition toolkit. In: IEEE 2011 workshop on automatic speech recognition and understanding, no. EPFL-CONF-192584. IEEE Signal Processing Society (2011)
Zaraki, A., Mazzei, D., Giuliani, M., De Rossi, D.: Designing and evaluating a social gaze-control system for a humanoid robot. IEEE Trans. Hum.-Mach. Syst. 44(2), 157–168 (2014)
Zaraki, A., Mazzei, D., Lazzeri, N., Pieroni, M., De Rossi, D.: Preliminary implementation of context-aware attention system for humanoid robots. In: Lepora, N.F., Mura, A., Krapp, H.G., Verschure, P.F.M.J., Prescott, T.J. (eds.) Living Machines 2013. LNCS, vol. 8064, pp. 457–459. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Reidsma, D., van Welbergen, H.: AsapRealizer in practice - a modular and extensible architecture for a bml realizer. Entertainment Comput. 4(3), 157–169 (2013)
van Welbergen, H., Yaghoubzadeh, R., Kopp, S.: AsapRealizer 2.0: the next steps in fluent behavior realization for ECAs. In: Bickmore, T., Marsella, S., Sidner, C. (eds.) IVA 2014. LNCS, vol. 8637, pp. 449–462. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Vouloutsi, V., Lallée, S., Verschure, P.F.M.J.: Modulating behaviors using allostatic control. In: Lepora, N.F., Mura, A., Krapp, H.G., Verschure, P.F.M.J., Prescott, T.J. (eds.) Living Machines 2013. LNCS, vol. 8064, pp. 287–298. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Lallée, S., Vouloutsi, V., Wierenga, S., Pattacini, U., Verschure, P.F.M.J: Efaa: a companion emerges from integrating a layered cognitive architecture. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, pp. 105–105. ACM (2014)
ter Maat, M., Heylen, D.: Flipper: an information state component for spoken dialogue systems. In: Vilhjálmsson, H.H., Kopp, S., Marsella, S., Thórisson, K.R. (eds.) IVA 2011. LNCS, vol. 6895, pp. 470–472. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Lazzeri, N., Mazzei, D., Zaraki, A., De Rossi, D.: Towards a believable social robot. In: Lepora, N.F., Mura, A., Krapp, H.G., Verschure, P.F.M.J., Prescott, T.J. (eds.) Living Machines 2013. LNCS, vol. 8064, pp. 393–395. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by grants from the European Research Council under the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/ERC grant agreement n. 611971 (EASEL) and n. 341196 (CDAC) to Paul F. M. J. Verschure.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Vouloutsi, V. et al. (2016). Towards a Synthetic Tutor Assistant: The EASEL Project and its Architecture. In: Lepora, N., Mura, A., Mangan, M., Verschure, P., Desmulliez, M., Prescott, T. (eds) Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. Living Machines 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9793. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_32
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_32
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-42416-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-42417-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)