Recent developments and future trends of industrial agents

The agent technology provides a new way to design and engineer control solutions based on the decentralization of control over distributed structures, addressing the current requirements for modern control systems in industrial domains. This paper presents the current situation of the development and deployment of agent technology, discussing the initiatives and the current trends faced for a wider dissemination and industrial adoption, based on the work that is being carried out by the IEEE IES Technical Committee on Industrial Agents

Transformative Pedagogies for Sustainable Development

Transformative pedagogies for sustainable development encourage learners to change the direction of development that seems to be inevitable by enhancing their awareness, understanding of complexities, empathy, compassion and empowermentPeer reviewe

ER4STEM educational robotics for science, technology, engineering and mathematics

Robotics is a popular vehicle to introduce young people to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) with various approaches worldwide that use robotics to teach or entertain or both, accompanied by various tools and repositories. However, the stakeholders involved have different goals and methods, thus difficulties in finding common ground. E.g. the focus in most cases is on increasing interest in STEM, but research methods are unspecified or vague; or despite the vastness of offerings, teachers are reluctant to incorporate activities in the classroom. In this paper, we introduce the Educational Robotics for STEM (ER4STEM) project that will realize a creative and critical use of educational robotics to maintain children’s curiosity in the world. An open and conceptual framework will bring three main stakeholders of educational robotics—teachers, educational researchers and organizations offering educational robotics—together through a user- and activity centered repository. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017

How can we teach educational robotics to foster 21st learning skills through PBL, Arduino and S4A?:

This paper provides a framework for (1) how we can foster the 21st century learning skills with educational robotics and some pedagogic strategies, (2) how Problem Based-Learning (PBL) can be used for teaching educational robotics, (3) how we can use a friendly technology to teach educational robotics such as S4A and Arduino, and (4) the evaluation of critical thinking through PBL. Quantitative results are presented to describe frequency codes, co-occurrences and similarity, and linking analysis about students’ critical thinking skills during PBL phases. Next to that, the qualitative data provide valuable information on how teachers use educational robotics during PBL, what its advantages and limitations are, and how this topic may develop students’ cognitive skills

Robot tutors: Welcome or ethically questionable?

Robot tutors provide new opportunities for education. However, they also introduce moral challenges. This study reports a systematic literature review (N = 256) aimed at identifying the moral considerations related to robots in education. While our findings suggest that robot tutors hold great potential for improving education, there are multiple values of both (special needs) children and teachers that are impacted (positively and negatively) by its introduction. Positive values related to robot tutors are: psychological welfare and happiness, efficiency, freedom from bias and usability. However, there are also concerns that robot tutors may negatively impact these same values. Other concerns relate to the values of friendship and attachment, human contact, deception and trust, privacy, security, safety and accountability. All these values relate to children and teachers. The moral values of other stakeholder groups, such as parents, are overlooked in the existing literature. The results suggest that, while there is a potential for applying robot tutors in a morally justified way, there are imported stakeholder groups that need to be consulted to also take their moral values into consideration by implementing tutor robots in an educational setting

The Effectiveness of a Robot Animal as a Virtual Instructor

The use of virtual robot animals (VRAs) can have a potential impact on applications with affective and aesthetic interfaces. In particular, VRAs can be used in instructional videos in order to develop new ways to engage young learners and to foster personalization of educational instruction. In this paper, we explore the perception of the virtual instructor appearance and its effect on knowledge recall outcomes for young learners. We conducted an experiment with three different virtual instructor appearances: (1) robot animal, (2) animal, and (3) human. The content of the video instruction had two themes: (A) A topic related to robotics (e.g., introductory concepts about robotics), and (B) a topic unrelated to robotics (e.g., Dutch culture). A total of 131 students participated in this study. They originated from two secondary public schools in Bogota, Colombia. Our results showed that the robot animal as a virtual instructor was perceived as the least familiar, common, attractive, interesting, and natural compared with the virtual instructors with the animal and human appearance. Moreover, learners in the condition with the virtual robot animal scored significantly lower on knowledge recall for both topics. A follow-up study can focus on ways to increase positive reactions toward robotic animals as virtual instructors. Video about this research: https://youtu.be/PY1CN0DoKF4

Personalizing educational game play with a robot partner

Personalization of educational and behavioral training to the developmental stage of the individual child is common practice in educational and therapeutic settings. Research on robot-based education training is only just starting to adopt this approach. We present a pilot study on a behavioral intervention design in which Pivotal Response Training (PRT) elements are embedded into a game played by a robot and a child. Seven game levels are designed to cover different levels of communication skills that are targeted by PRT. The levels do not differ with respect to the logical steps in the game that the children should take, only with respect to the social competence that the child has. The behaviors displayed at each stage were observed and analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods. Our results indicate that the more socially challenging a game is, the happier children are and the more children engage with playing the game, although the game challenge remains the same

Personalizing educational game play with a robot partner

Personalization of educational and behavioral training to the developmental stage of the individual child is common practice in educational and therapeutic settings. Research on robot-based education training is only just starting to adopt this approach. We present a pilot study on a behavioral intervention design in which Pivotal Response Training (PRT) elements are embedded into a game played by a robot and a child. Seven game levels are designed to cover different levels of communication skills that are targeted by PRT. The levels do not differ with respect to the logical steps in the game that the children should take, only with respect to the social competence that the child has. The behaviors displayed at each stage were observed and analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods. Our results indicate that the more socially challenging a game is, the happier children are and the more children engage with playing the game, although the game challenge remains the sam