Deploying Long-Term In-Home Robots During COVID-19
One facet of our research focuses on creating robust systems capable of autonomous operation in dynamic, unstructured settings like homes. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted several opportunities in our daily lives for which robots can play a social role [1]. For example, addressing mental health challenges or supplementing distance education.
Combating Social Isolation in Children
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed a robot teleoperation system tailored for elementary school-aged children, allowing them to engage in physical play even when physically separated [2]. This innovative approach empowers children to control the actions of robots in their friends’ homes and communicate with them. Our aim was to investigate the potential of social robots in mitigating the effects of social isolation in children.
The outcomes of our research, along with user feedback, suggest that robots can offer a fun and safe means for individuals to connect socially during a global pandemic. For more information about this project, visit https://robotsforgood.yale.edu/
Contactless Deployment of an In-Home, Long-Term Training Robot
To support social-skills training for adults with ASD during the COVID-19 pandemic, we explored how to design a system that allows for contactless delivery and is intuitive for a user to set up and use without in-person researcher assistance. The system was deployed for daily use for a week. We explain our design considerations and iterative design testing to achieve an autonomous system that provides effective social-skills training [3].
[1] Scassellati, B., & Vázquez, M. (2020). The potential of socially assistive robots during infectious disease outbreaks. Science Robotics, 5(44), eabc9014.
[2] Tsoi, N., Connolly, J., Adéníran, E., Hansen, A., Pineda, K. T., Adamson, T., Thompson, S., Ramnauth, R., & Scassellati, B. (2021, March). Challenges deploying robots during a pandemic: An effort to fight social isolation among children. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 234-242).
[3] Ramnauth, R., Adéníran, E., Adamson, T., Lewkowicz, M. A., Giridharan, R., Reiner, C., & Scassellati, B. (2022, March). A Social Robot for Improving Interruptions Tolerance and Employability in Adults with ASD. In 2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 4-13). IEEE.