Incorporating a humanoid robot to motivate the geometric figures learning

Technology has been introduced into educational environments to facilitate learning and engage the students interest. Robotics can be an interesting alternative to explore theoretical concepts covered in class. In this paper, a computational system capable of detecting objects was incorporated into the robot NAO, so it can Interact with students, recognizing geometric shapes with overlap. The system consists of two models of neural networks and was evaluated through a sequence of didatic activities presented to students of the 5th year, aiming to encourage them to perform the tasks. The robot operates autonomously, recognizing and counting the diferente objects in the image. The results show that the children felt very motivated and engaged to fulfill the tasks.São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP)Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq

Attention based object recognition applied to a humanoid robot

Analysis and recognition of objects in complex scenes is a demanding task for a computer. There is a selection mechanism, named visual attention, that optimizes the visual system, in which only the important parts of the scene are considered at a time. In this work, an object-based visual attention model with both bottom-up and top-down modulation is applied to the humanoid robot NAO to allow a new attention procedure to the robot. This means that the robot, by using its cameras, can recognize geometric figures even with the competition for the attention of all the objects in the image in real time. The proposed method is validated through some tests with 13 to 14 year old kids interacting with the robot NAO that provides some tips (such as the perimeter and area calculation formulas) and recognizes the figure showed by these children. The results are very promissor and show that the proposed approach can contribute for inserting robotics in the educacional context.São Paulo State Research Foundation (FAPESP)Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq