PRE2016 3 Groep6

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

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

Problem definition

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.

Objectives

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

1. Turn taking
2. Gaze behavior
3. Show interest

objective 4; Adapt to changes in the environment

Approach

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.

Tasks
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.

1. presentation preperation
2. search + read articles + summarize

Week 2

State of the Art

ZECA:
ZECA stands for Zeno Engaging Children with Autism. Zeno is smaller humanoid looking robot that can display facial expressions. ZECA can either be sad, happy, scared, surprised, angry or neutral. In a study [1] it was found that adults and typically developing children could identify Zeno’s facial expressions and gestures which intent to convey emotion. So, Zeno can interact with children through nonverbal communication such as body movements and facial expressions. This speeds up diagnosis and perhaps it can even enable it to be carried out before a child can talk[2].
Dr Dan Popa at the University of Texas at Arlington[2]: The idea is for the robot to instruct kids, give them some useful social skills and at the same time observe their reactions and calculate their reaction times. That calculation could form some kind of an autism scale.” Zeno has three modes in which it can be used[2]. Scripted mode of interaction. Here pre-programmed sequences of motions are performed by Zeno. Wizard of Oz mode. In this mode an operator or therapist can control the robot by tele-operations. In this mode, Zeno mirrors the motions of the instructor. In the third mode, the child can take control of the robot. However, this could be unsafe, because for both the child and the robot. So this mode is intended for entertainment only.

In another study[3], researchers were able to achieve human-robot interaction through mimicking behaviors between Zeno and humans. Zeno was given smooth motion that resembles human-like movement, taking into consideration that Zeno has a lower number of degrees of freedom compared to humans. The ability of having smooth motion contributes to the human-likeness of a robot. With the algorithms for smooth motion, Zeno was introduced to one child with ASD and his reaction was positive. The child was immediately attracted to Zeno and was tentative and responded to the instructions given through him.

Figure 1: ZECA robot [4]
In another study [5] researches compared the ability to recognize emotion of children diagnosed with autism with those of typically developing children. They looked at the effect of incorporating gestures to the emotion recognition accuracy in both child groups. No indication of a significant impairment in the general emotion recognition of the autism group was found. However, a specific shortfall in correctly identifying fear was found for the autism group when compared to the TD children. Furthermore, it was found that gestures can significantly impact the recognition accuracy for both children with autism and typically developing children. This is either in a negative or positive way depending on the specific expression. This study concluded that the use of gestures for conveying emotional expressions through a humanoid robot is relevant in a social skill therapy setting.
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.

Tasks

1. State of the art about objective 1&2 - Jolijn
2. State of the art about objective 3&4 - Fenna
3. Prepare, do and work out the interview - Bo & Sietske

Questions to answer for next meeting:

Week 3

Interview with Barakova

In week 3 we had a meeting with Emilia Barakova, in which we asked some question about here research. She suggested some possibilities for our game. Thursday we will discuss here suggestion and determine which sort of game we want to develop.

• insert the transcription later here

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Planning

To make sure that we manage our project in the best possible way we made a planning in which we incorporated everything we wanted to do. At the end of the eight weeks of the project we want to have two deliverables a literature study and our own game.
Since the knowledge of the literature study is needed to develop a game, we decided that the literature study had to be finished by the end of week 3. This is also our first milestone.
There are a couple of reasons why we first want to do a literature study. Firstly, we want to have a good and complete overview of what is already developed and what researches have already done. Our goal is to develop a new game and not to duplicate or further develop an existing technology. Secondly, this gives us a good idea which niches we have to further investigate for our own game. This is a lot of work but should be feasible within 3 weeks.
The second part of our research will be qualitative research. More specifically: interviews with specialists. The first one to interview is Emilia Barakova. We thought it would be nice if we could speak to her as soon as possible since she has done of research about this topic as well. That is why we planned an appointment with her at the beginning of week 3. Of course we also planned in some time to prepare the interviews and to transcribe and code them. This should be finished by the end of week 5.
With the knowledge of the literature study and the interviews we can develop our own game. This last phase will consist of a design phase and a realization phase. We planned to start this phase already at the beginning of week 3, because by that time we will already have sufficient knowledge to take the first steps in our design. The design should be finished by the end of week 7. This is our second milestone. The last week will be reserved for any delays and the cleaning up of the wiki. So just the finishing touch. The third and last milestone represents the end of our project. This will of course be at the end of week 8.

Gantt chart
To make this planning as clear as possible we made a Gantt chart out of it. For this Gantt chart we divided all the work we had to do, as discussed above, in five sections. These sections are: presentations, literature study, qualitative research, implementation and finishing touch. Out of this basic planning we made a Gantt chart. This was done with Smartsheet (https://www.smartsheet.com/). The sections and its subtasks and the Gantt chart can be seen in the appendix. The grey horizontal bars represent the sections as explained earlier and the green bars below each grey one represent its subtasks. Some bars are connected with arrows. These represent a causal relationship: which task is the follow up task of another, i.e. what has to be done before a task can be started. In week 8, it can be seen that everything comes together in the last milestone: project finished! At this point in time, all the sections are finished which means that all the tasks specified are done. Note: the week of Feb 27 is made red because that is the week of the spring holydays. Since this is not an official school week we decided not to plan any deadlines in that week.