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The goal of this course-long, group assignment is to tackle a concrete interaction problem of a social robot with (a) user(s).
To do this, you will design and develop a prototype for a socially interactive NAO robot. You will have the freedom to come up with your own interaction design inspired by a specific use case. You will have to be creative (think outside the box), but also extremely specific (interaction goal must be narrow in scope). You will be developing robot software (see robot software part in the weekly milestones) as well as documenting your design (see design document part in the weekly milestones). Examples of concrete interaction problems are:
How to make a robot persuasive?
How to effectively personalize interactioncreate legible affective robot expressions for the basic emotions?
How to make a robot emotionally expressiveavoid misgendering of users by social robots?
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Some examples that might help you define your interaction problem, key measures, and help you with the writing, can be found in the repository below.
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Important: You will be also asked to continuously work on a work logbook every week in which every group documents the individual contributions people have worked on during the corresponding week. There is no fixed format and the group should keep in the work logbook in the Google Drive folder of the respective group. This is important, as the TAs and also the teaching staff will frequently review the logbook to check if students are on track and to prevent students from free-riding in their group.
Interaction Problem Presentation (Deadline Friday
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17-11)
You need to create an interaction problem presentation (slides) about your project. The presentation should explain the main ideas and goals that you have for designing your socially interactive robot. You should explain the context, main aims, interaction problem and evaluation measures you plan to use. Think about using pictures to illustrate your ideas.
You need to add your presentation to your group’s Google folder. You should also share the presentation with another group and with the UU theatre students by mailing them a url link which provides them with viewing access (also, add your TA in the cc: of both of these mails). The deadline for sending these emails is Friday 1817-11.
During course week 4 (exact dates to be announced), students from Utrecht University will be present at the VU at one of your practical sessions. Here, you will present your main ideas and the interaction problem you have been working on to the theatre students. Also, you will have a peer review session in which you or another group will present their interaction problem and feedback will be provided on this presentation by the group who is not presenting.
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As a follow-up, the UU theatre students will create a moodboard to inspire you to think out of the box. This moodboard will be submitted by the UU theatre students latest by Wednesday, 3029-11.
First working prototype (Deadline Friday
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24-11)
In course week 4. Deadline 2524-11. 23:59: your first working prototype should be ready to show a demo of your interaction problem. You should update your Github repository accordingly.
Final social interactive robot (Deadline Friday
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08-12)
In course week 6. Deadline 0908-12. 23:59: your final socially interactive robot should be ready for evaluation (that is, to be used in the experiments). You should update your Github repository accordingly.
Experiment material (Deadline Friday
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08-12)
In course week 6. Deadline 0908-12. 23:59. Upload evaluation procedure and set-up and materials for the experiment in your Google Drive folder. Your group will run the experiment next week. The schedule for the experiments will be announced in a timely manner. Please make sure that your experiment is reproducible, i.e. also others can run your experiment. Also provide a requirements.txt file or similar which includes necessary libraries and dependencies on might have to install prior to conducting your experiment.
Upload video of your NAO project (Deadline Sunday
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17-12)
During your final presentation (see the info below), you will also show a live demo of your NAO project. Since unexpected issues can always occur (such as noise disturbances, technical failures etc.), we ask you to record a video of a demo of your NAO project. This video functions only as a backup in case on the day of your presentation something will go wrong (of course, we do not hope so!). So we do not expect fancy videos with effects etc! Those videos should be recorded in of your last practical sessions. Please upload your final video in the Google Drive folder of your group.
Final Poster (Deadline Sunday
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17-12) Submission on Canvas!
Prepare a poster (A0 format!) that will support your final presentation (see the info below). It should include:
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We will provide you with a template that will be uploaded to the Google Drive folders.
Design Document (Deadline Monday
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18-12). Submission on Canvas!
The design document that you will need to write throughout the course should follow the general structure of a research paper. Hence, it should have common sections such as an introduction, method part, discussion and a conclusion.
Please follow the following template.
The maximum number of pages (excluding references) is 12, single column. The Overleaf template can be found here.
Final Presentation (Tuesday
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19-12)
The motto of the final video presentation is: Show how your socially interactive robot came to life!
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Your video will be ranked by the other groups present in the session. The two groups in each session that are ranked highest will get a bonus (on top of their final grade). See Grading criteria below for how to rank a group. The TAs and teacher present in a session will also grade the final presentations.
Grading
Grades for each of the main deliverables will contribute to a final grade for your group work and will be weight as follows:
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Robot software (20%)
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Design document (50%):
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Final presentation (30%)
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Individual micro-assignments presented during class (not graded, .5 penalty if you miss two or more)
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Note on grading
In case we find clear differences in what and how much individual group members have contributed to the final result (deliverables), we may take this into account and differentiate grades for individual group members. We will use input from the TAs who will discuss with your group each week to establish such differences.