Robots that Teach

Yale School of Management

Robots have long been used to provide assistance to individual users through physical interaction, typically by supporting direct physical rehabilitation or by providing a service such as retrieving items or cleaning floors. Socially assistive robotics (SAR) is a comparatively new field of robotics that focuses on developing robots capable of assisting users through social rather than physical interaction. Just as a good coach or teacher can provide motivation, guidance, and support without making physical contact with a student, socially assistive robots attempt to provide the appropriate emotional, cognitive, and social cues to encourage development, learning, or therapy for an individual. In this talk, I will review some of the reasons why physical robots rather than virtual agents are essential to this effort, highlight some of the major research issues within this area, and describe some of our recent results building supportive robots for teaching social skills to children with autism spectrum disorder, teaching 3rd graders about how to deal with bullies, teaching fractions to 6th graders, and teaching English to students who speak Spanish at home.