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Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 ( 2014 ) 424 – 430

WCLTA 2013 An Educational Humanoid Laboratory Tour Guide

Răzvan Gabriel Boboc a *, Moga Horațiu a, Doru Talabă a

aFaculty of Mechanical Engineering, Department of Automotive and Transport Engineering, Transilvania University of Brașov, 1 Politehnicii Street, Brașov 500024, Country

Abstract

In this research we intend to use a robot as a tool to offer a tour guide to the Industrial Informatics and Laboratory from Research & Development Institute of Brașov. In this laboratory there are a lot of devices used for research and every time when new visitors or students come to see them, an operator must explain what each device is used for. Therefore, we decided to use one of the (namely robot from Aldebaran Robotics) to welcome new visitors and make them a tour of the lab, giving explanations about the research that take place in this laboratory. Nao is very versatile and therefore is suitable for this purpose, being able to walk, to make gestures with its arms and hands, to speak and also to interact with peoples. We have used Choregraphe, a graphical interface where are used drag and drop boxes that can be interconnected one with other to create simple behaviours. The robot will stay in a fixed position, at the entrance in laboratory and whenever a visitor will come, it will be ready to make a tour.

©© 20142014 The Authors. PublishedPublished by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (Selectionhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ and peer-review under responsibility of the). Organizing Committee of WCLTA 2013. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of WCLTA 2013. Keywords: First keywords, second keywords, third keywords, forth keywords;

1. Introduction

Robotics is an increasingly growing industry and among others, is useful in the educational process. In past years robotics has attracted the interest of teachers and researchers, being a valuable tool on student’s learning from pre- school to high school in various subject areas or personal development (Alimisis, 2013), not only as a topic of study, but also for other more general aspects of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education (Feil-Seifer & Matarić, 2009). Educational robots have become a part of educational technology, where they are used to facilitate learning and improve educational performance of students, gaining at the same time experience in a variety

* Corresponding Author: Răzvan Gabriel Boboc. Tel.: +4-0745-987-710 E-mail address: [email protected]

1877-0428 © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of WCLTA 2013. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.05.074 R ăzvan Gabriel Boboc et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 ( 2014 ) 424 – 430 425 of real-world tasks and problems. The aim of the robotic education is to make the students know the elements of robot and to enhance their abilities on planning applications by using the robot applications and more for experiencing the existing mechanic construction (Tekerek, 2009), but there are also many robots used as learning and teaching assistants in educational settings. They can be divided into two categories according to (Han, 2010): (or hands-on robotics) and educational service robotics. They can play three roles (Miller, Nourbakhsh, & Siegwart, 2008): the robot as a programming project, as a learning focus or as a learning collaborator. Therefore, robots can operate as both learning media and robotic educators. A is an ideal learning tool for classes and laboratories, allowing students to connect theory with practice and discover a wide range of robotics-related fields. Robots provide an embodiment and the ability to add social interaction with people. Robots can have a large number of modalities to establish interactions with humans. They have found usefulness in many activities, including: assisting children in schools, security and rescue applications, medical or domestic services, providing information for visitors in museums and exhibitions. (Mubin, Stevens, Shahid, Al Mahmud, & Dong, 2013) present an analytical overview of the field of robots in education, classifying them according to some criteria, including domain of the learning activity, location of the activity, the role of the robot, types of robots and types of robotic behaviour. In this research we intend to use a robot as a tool to offer a tour guide to the Industrial Informatics and Robotics Laboratory from Research & Development Institute of Brașov. The robot will sit at the entrance of the laboratory and will welcome visitors in the lab. It will be able to give visitors a tour of the lab, explaining about the research that is done by students. The robot has therefore two roles: is a tour guide and also an educational robot, offering both education and entertainment (often referred to as ‘edutainment’), the robot having the role of mentor (Goodrich & Schultz, 2007). Hence, the robot guide the visitors into the lab, but it provide also technical details about the activities that occur in the lab and about the devices that are used in the research activity. The visitors are in general students, but not only. The students that want to attend the university can make an idea about what they will study at this department and other visitors can improve their knowledge in the field. The aim of this paper is also to give an overview of tour-guide robots that were developed over the time, most of them being used for guiding in museums.

2. Problem statement

As we mentioned above, an educational robot can be used as a tool to keep students interested and motivated in learning technology, computers, and other domains, but it can have also the role of attracting students to an institution, offering them interesting presentations of the learning activity that take place in there. The NAO humanoid robot was promoted in education, as a teaching tool and as a learning tool (Aldebaran). In this paper we intend to use Nao as a laboratory guide. In our laboratory from Research & Development Institute of Brașov there are a lot of devices used for research and every time when new visitors or students come to see them, an operator must explain what each device is used for. Therefore, we decided to use one of our robots as a tool to welcome new visitors and make them a tour of the lab, giving explanations instead of a real operator. Students also can require a presentation of robot itself, discovering his features such as locomotion, voice recognition, text-to- speech, face recognition and so on. This is also an effective way of introducing students to robotics, which can be considered as the next most popular field in education in the years to come. As a tour guide, the educational humanoid robot would attract visitors, leading them to places of interest and offering them presentations.

3. Related work

Tour-guide robots were developed over the years by many researchers, they developing applications in various domains. In table 1 are summarized the most well-known robots that were created for that purpose.

Table 1. Tour-guide robots

Where it Name Location where it has been installed 426 Răzvan Gabriel Boboc et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 ( 2014 ) 424 – 430

operates Museum Rhino (Burgard et al., 1998) Deutsches Museum Bonn Minerva (Thrun et al., 1999) Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Sage (Nourbakhsh et al., 1999) Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Chips (Willeke, Kunz, & Nourbakhsh, Carnegie Museum of Natural History 2001) Care-o-bot (Schraft, Graf, Traub, & John, Museum für Kommunikation 2001) Hermes (Bischoff & Graefe, 2002) Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum Jinny (Gunhee et al., 2004) National Science Museum of Korea Robovie (Shiomi, Kanda, Ishiguro, & Osaka Science Museum Hagita, 2006) Enon (Frontech, 2007) Kyotaro Nishimura Museum Cicerobot (Chella & Macaluso, 2009) Archaeological Museum of Agrigento Urbano (Rodriguez-Losada et al., 2008) Principe Felipe Museum Indigo (Vogiatzis et al., 2008) Cultural institute Exhibition hall RoboX (Siegwart et al., 2003) Swiss National Exposition Expo.02 Mona, Oskar (IPA, 2009) Opel exposition Berlin Toyota (McKeegan, 2007) Toyota Kaikan Exhibition Hall University Virgil (Thrapp, Westbrook, & Rice University Subramanian, 2001) Bryn Mawr (Chiu, 2004) Bryn Mawr College NTU-I (Kuo-Hung et al., 2008) National Taiwan University GOAT (LeBlanc, 2012) Worcester Polytechnic Institute Campus Other building Grace (Simmons et al., 2003) AAAI Robot Challenge Biron (Haasch et al., 2004) Home-tour guide Robotinho (Faber et al., 2009) The 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic Toomas (Gross et al., 2009) Germany stores Sancho (Gonzalez et al., 2009) TV shows Konrad, Suse (Stricker et al., 2012) Konrad Zuse building Cate (Beckwith, Sherbrook, Lefief, Engineering and Technology building Williams, & Yelamarthi, 2012) Tawabo (Mogg, 2012) Tokyo Tower

Most of the tour guide robot consists of mobile platforms with various computers, sensors, and other components mounted on it (Burgard et al., 1998), (Simmons et al., 2003), (Haasch et al., 2004), (Chiu, 2004; Gonzalez et al., R ăzvan Gabriel Boboc et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 ( 2014 ) 424 – 430 427

2009), (Beckwith et al., 2012; LeBlanc, 2012), but there are also robots equipped with arms (Bischoff & Graefe, 2002), (Gunhee et al., 2004), (McKeegan, 2007) or robotic face to interact with people (Rodriguez-Losada et al., 2008). Others have an affective comportment, expressing emotions (Vogiatzis et al., 2008) or have a showy design to attract tourist (Mogg, 2012). Some of them have been developed for indoor environments, but also for outdoor environments (Thrapp et al., 2001), (Kuo-Hung et al., 2008), having significantly different design challenges in the way of autonomous navigation (LeBlanc, 2012). Humanoid robots are also preferred by researchers (Shiomi et al., 2006), (Faber et al., 2009) because such robots could be capable of intuitive, multimodal interaction with people, this making humanoid robots an ideal platform for tour guide projects (Faber et al., 2009). Many types of interaction were been used by researchers in their works with tour-guide robots. The interactions are usually based on speech, gesture, graphical user interface or dynamic hand gesture (Alvarez-Santos, Iglesias, Pardo, Regueiro, & Canedo-Rodriguez, 2013). The robot presented in (Kanda, Sato, Saiwaki, & Ishiguro, 2007) is capable of human-like expression and recognizes individuals. As it can be seen in the presented works, the tour-guide robots were attracted the interest of researchers and their works have evolved over the years, by adding more functionalities, more sensors to perceive the environment, more algorithm for navigation, localization, mapping and control.

4. Methods

In our work we have used a humanoid robot to make a tour guide of the laboratory. The robot sit near the entrance and when a visitor or a group of visitors enter the laboratory, it is “awakened” and will lead visitors, stopping at interest points to explain what is happening there. In Figure 1 are presented some frames from a preliminary experiment. As can be seen in pictures, the robot is in stable position. If its services are required, it stands up and starts to walk to the first objective. Here, the robot will give a presentation to the visitors, showing with his arm the equipment it talking about. After finishing his tour, the robot will return to the entrance and will go in the stable position. The robot should be able to autonomous navigate around the lab and to stop at predefined places to show the visitors the most interesting devices and people working with them. We intend to use Naomarks, markers that can be recognized by the robot. These landmarks are placed at different locations in proximity of the interest points. Depending on which landmark NAO detects, it will know what to say, exposing the corresponding speech. After the robot finish what it has to say, it continues the tour, find the next landmark and stops beside it. The robot will look for the landmark just in one predefined direction, so it will not speak many times about the same thing. For a safe navigation, Nao use his sonars to detect obstacles and then it try to avoid them.

Fig. 1. Poses of the robot throughout the laboratory guide

In this way the interaction with the visitors is natural. The visitors follow the robot and listen what it speaks about. Nao has a build-in text-to-speech engine and can speak up to 9 languages, so it could synthesize any text, but also he can play any sound, loading a speech that was previously recorded by an operator with his own voice. NAO is the most widely used humanoid robot for learning STEM and is additionally open to extra-curricular activities in raising awareness of the sciences in museums, and more broadly, to core businesses of the future and 428 Răzvan Gabriel Boboc et al. / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 141 ( 2014 ) 424 – 430

was named the best robot for education as part of the "Robot Hall of Fame®" Competition organized by Carnegie Mellon (Newswire, 2012). It is very versatile, being able to walk, to make gestures with its arms and hands, to speak and also to interact with peoples, so it is suitable for guiding. It is fully programmable, being able to be continuously developed and meeting the requirements of educational methods. NAO was created by French company Aldebaran Robotic introduced in 2007. The robot is 57 cm tall, having 25 degrees of freedom and supports Wi-Fi connection. The ability of NAO to be programmed into doing an unlimited number of different tasks also makes this robot a very flexible helper for all kinds of subjects in the classroom at all levels. For the purpose presented above, we have used Choregraphe, a graphical interface where are used drag and drop boxes that can be interconnected one with other to create simple behaviours. Nao runs NaoQi, a framework that give access to all the features of the robot and Choregraphe gives intuitively access to all functions provided by NaoQi (Pot, Monceaux, Gelin, & Maisonnier, 2009). With this software the robot can teach new positions in a very simple way and can go in a specific position or to recognize landmarks.

5. Conclusion

Tour-guide robots can be used as educational tools in real laboratories. The advantage of such a robot is that the students can directly interact with it, can learn more from it, can touch the equipment and they are also entertained and motivated. In this regard, an educational humanoid robot was proposed as a laboratory guide, meeting both the requirements related to the quality of learning and the appearance of the learner. The literature review showed that these tools used successfully over the years in education and entertainment, in a variety of prototypes. The future work includes a study that displays the impact of laboratory-guide robot in pedagogical dimension, so we have to develop the software to be fully functional and to test the system with real visitors to investigate this dimension. One the other hand, we intend to share functionality, using two robots for the proposed objective. One robot will welcome visitors and interact with them by voice and gestures in a natural way and then, after describe the research that it is done, it send the information to the other robot, that will guide the visitors. Another future work is to extend the functionality to other labs, so that the robot to be able to guide visitors around the whole institution, entering in each lab and giving presentations about the work that is done there.

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