COEN 4890/ EECE 5890

Development in Computer Applications:

Human-Robot Interaction
Assignment #6
Midterm Project Presentation and Demo
Due: March 15th 2016
Play Date with Nao
Team Members:
Joshua John & John C. Williams
Robot:
NAO Robot
Features being implemented:
Emotions, Dialogue, Animation, Speech-Rec, Randomization (Python
Box), Choice
HRI Application Domain:
Children Entertainment
Goal/Purpose/Requirements:
Our goal is to create an interactive application to be run on the NAO
Robots. This application will be created in Choreographe with the aim
of creating a fun and entertaining way to get adolescents engaged in
their own imaginations while sparking interest in reading books for
more entertaining stories as well as building an interest in robotics. The
application is in a development stage and has room for immense
improvement in the later stages, but this midterm development is a
perfect fully functional skeleton.
This application for NAO robots will read a short story and play
guessing games with children to engage them for a period of time.
Creating this application allows parents who may otherwise be too
busy to read to their children to have a viable and engaging option that
will greatly aid the child in future reading and writing skills. The
requirements to have this HRI involve speech recognition, animation,
dialogue, face-detection and tracking.
Basic Design:
The design we are following is a very linear approach with a few loop
backs to create a concrete multi-choice application. The approach will
be the NAO speaking with animation then asking what the user wants

to do with the choices of hearing a story or playing a game. The user

will select one using their voice then the NAO will play out the
designated animation along with the required dialogue or audio. Then
the NAO will ask to repeat the process if desired.
Specific design description:

We start with dialog and an animation which proceeds to voice

recognition with multiple options. The options lead to a few dialog
scenerios, then if the choice is to continue is sent to either story or
they are sent to a game that randomally picks audio files to play
accompanied by voice recognition for the user to guess who is
speaking in the audio file. Both of these options lead to the same
dialog/voice recongition asking if the user wants to repeat the process,
if yes it starts from the first option if no it terminates.
YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEP3pQV40so
Webpage: Groupc45.weebly.com/play-date-with-nao
Research Papers:
Must be accessed on Marquette Affiliated Computer (Due to licensing of research
papers)

1) http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41404495.pdf
Should you read aloud to your children written by Sandra
McCormick is a paper about the importance of reading aloud to
children during their peak learning years. The paper explains that
reading aloud to young children is very important because it
impacts the childs reading performance, reading interest levels
and their language abilities. McCormick explains that children
who were read to performed at a significantly higher level of
comprehension with vocabulary and with reading speed when in

comparison to children who were not read to. The paper also
describes children that were read to as being far more interested
in books in the future and had an interest in reading compared to
children who were not exposed to it. Lastly discussed was very
young children and infants who were read to developed a far
greater vocabulary even at ages as low as just over a year. This
paper sheds absolute light on the importance of having a child
read to, and that is what our NAO application intends on doing.
2) Interactive Robots as Social Partners and Peer Tutors for
Children: A Field Trial
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1470000/1466551/p61-kanda.pdf?
ip=134.48.160.195&id=1466551&acc=ACTIVE
%20SERVICE&key=5E5F143D919E1EED%2E7A460435F505E86F
%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35%2E4D4702B0C3E38B35&CFID=591890138&
CFTOKEN=56963426&__acm__=1458064365_0078cdbc75f31c0c963d4
5fa2e6b3bd0
This paper is about an experiment that a robotics lab at Osaka
University. What these guys did was had children interact with robots
as partners and tutors over a certain period of time and recorded to
see what worked and what didnt when it comes to human robot
interaction. The most eye opening thing that was discovered during
this experiment the kids got bored of the robots after a week or two so
the new problem to solve is how to keep the robots interesting enough
for kids to want to use them as tutors and other social roles.
3) The Educational Use of Home Robots for Children
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?
tp=&arnumber=1513808
This paper is about the educational use of robots in the home. In Korea,
a main focus of learning for kids is English. There are multiple ways
families teach their kids English, theres the classic books, then theres
using a computer, and lastly using a home robot. This paper focuses on
the IROBI robot, which is designed to teach kids different things. The
experiment was to figure out which learning medium was most
effective, the books, Internet or robot. They found out that the home
robot was most effective in teaching the kids English.