General overview
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. 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 create legible affective robot expressions for the basic emotions?
How to avoid misgendering of users by social robots?
…
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.
Examples of papers
Multidisciplinary Collaboration
The field of Social Robotics is multidisciplinary. Often the best solutions in this field are solutions that combine and incorporate knowledge from different (not necessarily technical) domains. Throughout this course, each group will work together with theatre students from Utrecht University who take part in the course Expanding Performance. You will (in week 47, course week 4) present your idea and what you have done so far to the theatre students. The theatre students will reflect on your presentation and create a mood board to provide inspiration, input, and feedback (beginning of week 47, course week 5). You are asked to reflect on their mood board and think about what you can do to improve your design with their input. It is up to you whether you will incorporate some of their ideas into your design or not.
In week 49 (course week 6), the UU students will join the practical sessions for a second time. Now, you will present your project including a live demo. The theatre students will review your live demo from an audience perspective and will provide you with feedback that you can use to further improve and fine-tune your interaction. In week 7, they will make their robot review available to your groups so you can reflect upon this.
The cooperation between the courses given at the Utrecht University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is related to the cooperation of these universities in the NWO project Acting Like a Robot: Theatre as Testbed for the Robot Revolution. For more on this project also see the website here.
Running an experiment - evaluate your interaction problem
During course week 7, your group will run an experiment with fellow students (two other groups with 6 students each, so a total of 12 test subjects) to test your interaction design that you have developed during the course. You will also analyze the data and report the findings.
Important deadlines
During the course, you will work on your own implementation of tackling a concrete interaction problem of a social robot with (a) user(s). For this, there are several important tasks to complete for each course week. The weekly tasks relate to both, the robot software as well as to the design document.
For each of the two types (robot software and design document) final deadlines exist. Moreover, you will have to do a presentation for the UU students you will collaborate with. In the following, you can see more details about each of those important components.
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 18-11)
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 18-11.
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.
Make notes of both sessions in which you receive feedback on your project which you should also reflect upon.
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, 30-11.
First working prototype (Deadline Friday 25-11)
In course week 4. Deadline 25-11. 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 09-12)
In course week 6. Deadline 09-12. 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 09-12)
In course week 6. Deadline 09-12. 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 18-12)
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 18-12) Submission on Canvas!
Prepare a poster (A0 format!) that will support your final presentation (see the info below). It should include:
Key take-away message
Research question and method used
Results (obtained from running the experiments)
Conclusion and points for further research
We will provide you with a template that will be uploaded to the Google Drive folders.
Design Document (Deadline Monday 19-12). 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 20-12)
The motto of the final video presentation is: Show how your socially interactive robot came to life!
In your presentation you can demonstrate your socially interactive robot (by a live demo) but you should also briefly introduce your group, introduce your use case, explain the design choices you made and why, present highlights from the design and development process itself (create some photo/video material at various moments during the course), and your main findings. Think of this presentation as selling your own work to the rest of the world. After your presentation, there should be still time for a short discussion about your results with the audience, so you should also prepare for possible questions.
The presentations should be about 10 minutes long and will take place In the lobby of the NU-building. We will have two separate sessions, and your group will be assigned to only one of the two sessions. The first session goes from 10.00 to 12.00, whereas the second starts at 13.00 and ends at 15.00. We will provide you with further info as soon as possible.
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:
Robot software (20%)
Design document (50%):
Final presentation (30%)
Individual micro-assignments presented during class (not graded, .5 penalty if you miss two or more)
Bonus point based on ranking within your session (top ranked group 1 point, second-ranked group .5 point)
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.