A Pilot Study with a Novel Setup for Collaborative Play of the Humanoid Robot KASPAR with children with autism

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.This article describes a pilot study in which a novel experimental setup, involving an autonomous humanoid robot, KASPAR, participating in a collaborative, dyadic video game, was implemented and tested with children with autism, all of whom had impairments in playing socially and communicating with others. The children alternated between playing the collaborative video game with a neurotypical adult and playing the same game with the humanoid robot, being exposed to each condition twice. The equipment and experimental setup were designed to observe whether the children would engage in more collaborative behaviours while playing the video game and interacting with the adult than performing the same activities with the humanoid robot. The article describes the development of the experimental setup and its first evaluation in a small-scale exploratory pilot study. The purpose of the study was to gain experience with the operational limits of the robot as well as the dyadic video game, to determine what changes should be made to the systems, and to gain experience with analyzing the data from this study in order to conduct a more extensive evaluation in the future. Based on our observations of the childrens’ experiences in playing the cooperative game, we determined that while the children enjoyed both playing the game and interacting with the robot, the game should be made simpler to play as well as more explicitly collaborative in its mechanics. Also, the robot should be more explicit in its speech as well as more structured in its interactions. Results show that the children found the activity to be more entertaining, appeared more engaged in playing, and displayed better collaborative behaviours with their partners (For the purposes of this article, ‘partner’ refers to the human/robotic agent which interacts with the children with autism. We are not using the term’s other meanings that refer to specific relationships or emotional involvement between two individuals.) in the second sessions of playing with human adults than during their first sessions. One way of explaining these findings is that the children’s intermediary play session with the humanoid robot impacted their subsequent play session with the human adult. However, another longer and more thorough study would have to be conducted in order to better re-interpret these findings. Furthermore, although the children with autism were more interested in and entertained by the robotic partner, the children showed more examples of collaborative play and cooperation while playing with the human adult.Peer reviewe

Intuitive Teleoperation of an Intelligent Robotic System Using Low-Cost 6-DOF Motion Capture

There is currently a wide variety of six degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) motion capture technologies available. However, these systems tend to be very expensive and thus cost prohibitive. A software system was developed to provide 6-DOF motion capture using the Nintendo Wii remote’s (wiimote) sensors, an infrared beacon, and a novel hierarchical linear-quaternion Kalman filter. The software is made freely available, and the hardware costs less than one hundred dollars. Using this motion capture software, a robotic control system was developed to teleoperate a 6-DOF robotic manipulator via the operator’s natural hand movements. The teleoperation system requires calibration of the wiimote’s infrared cameras to obtain an estimate of the wiimote’s 6-DOF pose. However, since the raw images from the wiimote’s infrared camera are not available, a novel camera-calibration method was developed to obtain the camera’s intrinsic parameters, which are used to obtain a low-accuracy estimate of the 6-DOF pose. By fusing the low-accuracy estimate of 6-DOF pose with accelerometer and gyroscope measurements, an accurate estimation of 6-DOF pose is obtained for teleoperation. Preliminary testing suggests that the motion capture system has an accuracy of less than a millimetre in position and less than one degree in attitude. Furthermore, whole-system tests demonstrate that the teleoperation system is capable of controlling the end effector of a robotic manipulator to match the pose of the wiimote. Since this system can provide 6-DOF motion capture at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods, it has wide applicability in the field of robotics and as a 6-DOF human input device to control 3D virtual computer environments

An Environment for Stroke Therapy Game Authoring

Stroke is the leading cause of disability in the industrialized world. The disabilities caused by stroke can significantly impact the quality of daily life for stroke survivors. Studies show that a high number of daily body movement repetitions can help recover lost motor functionality. However, many stroke patients do not perform the home exercises needed to reach this high number of repetitions. Games for rehabilitation have been shown to provide motivation to perform home exercises. However, because stroke can leave survivors with different levels of disability, custom games are required. Creating custom games, though, is time consuming and requires advanced programming knowledge. A tool for quick and easy game development is a solution to this problem. In this masterΓÇÖs project, I collaborated with a doctoral occupational therapy student to take steps towards developing a game authoring environment custom to therapists

Autonomous Vehicle Control

A practical knowledge base in the emerging field of Robotics was developed and used to create a framework for further experiments. The framework was designed such that modular parts could be replaced, allowing for future development without reinventing the wheel . To prove the framework, a semi-autonomous robot was implemented, including stereo vision sensors, an inertial navigation system, and a simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm

Gaming controllers for research robots: controlling a humanoid robot using a WIIMOTE

In this article we describe the use of a standard game console joystick, namely the Nintendo Wiimote, for controlling a HOAP-2 humanoid robot. We give a short overview on the use of tangible user interfaces, followed by the description of the used game controller and the measurements of some of its characteristics. We show the ease of applicability of inexpensive and robust standard game controllers for direct translation between the user’s intent and the robot actions on a two-handed robot drumming task

A survey of interfaces using handheld devices to intuitively drive and show objects to a social robot.

International audienceWithin this paper, we present three human-robot interfaces using handheld device as mediator object between the human and the robot: a virtual keyboard interface on the iPhone, a gesture based interface on the iPhone too and a Wiimote based interface. These interfaces allow to show particular objects to a robot. They were designed to be ease- of-use, specially by non-expert users, and to span different metaphors of interaction. In order to compare them and study the impact of the metaphor on the interaction, we designed a user-study based on two obstacle courses. Each of the 25 participants performed two courses with two different interfaces (total of 100 trials). Although the three interfaces were rather equally efficient and all considered as satisfying by the participants, the iPhone gesture interface was largely preferred while the Wiimote was poorly chosen due to the impact of the chosen metaphor