The EASEL Project: Towards Educational Human-Robot Symbiotic Interaction

This paper presents the EU EASEL project, which explores the potential impact and relevance of a robot in educational settings. We present the project objectives and the theorectical background on which the project builds, briefly introduce the EASEL tech

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ract. This paper presents the EU EASEL project, which explores the potential impact and relevance of a robot in educational settings. We present the project objectives and the theorectical background on which the project builds, briefly introduce the EASEL technological developments, and end with a summary of what we have learned from the evaluation studies carried out in the project so far. Keywords: Synthetic Tutoring Assistant · DAC robot interaction · Architecture · Evaluation

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Introduction

This paper presents the EU EASEL project (“Expressive Agents for Symbiotic Education and Learning”), which explores the potential impact and relevance of a robot in educational settings. EASEL targets Human Robot Symbiotic Interaction (HRSI) in the domain of education and learning. Symbiosis is taken here as the capacity of the robot and the person to mutually influence each other, D. Reidsma—This project has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2013-10) as part of EASEL under grant agreement no. 611971. Coauthors are grouped by institute. c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016  N.F. Lepora et al. (Eds.): Living Machines 2016, LNAI 9793, pp. 297–306, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0 27

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and alter each other’s behaviour over different time-scales (within encounters and across encounters). Based on perception of the social, communicative and educational context, the robot responds to the student in order to influence their learning progress. The impact of EASEL developments crucially depends on the combination of two domains. The field of human robot interaction concerns conversational and social interaction between humans and robots. This involves short term interactions as well as the development of a relation over longer time through repeated interactions. The field of learning and education concerns principles and practices of how a student learns in interaction with other people and learning materials (Charisi et al. 2015). The theoretical work carried out in EASEL concerns the integration of insights from these two fields. Clearly, the resulting tutoring assistant(s) need to be evaluated. EASEL achieves this through a combination of lab studies and in-the-wild studies in schools, museums, and daycare centers. The studies carried out in EASEL range across the combination of the two above domains, from studies focusing on the development of a longer term relation between human and robot to studies focusing on the exact effect of certain tasks on the learning process and outcome. The paper is structured as follows. We introduce the EASEL objectives in Sect. 2. Section 3 briefly discusses the interplay between the two above mentioned domains of learning and social interaction. Section 4 focuses on the technology developed in EASEL. Section 5 summarizes the EASEL evaluation studies carried out so far, placing them in the framework between HRI and education. Finally, we tie the results together in Sect. 6, looking at the futur