Robotics & Automation

The demand for energy is increasing worldwide and the best way to meet this demand is a clean renewable energy source. Among the various options available solar energy can be considered as the best renewable energy source. This paper deals with design, fabrication and performance study of a solar air heater coupled with evacuated tubes and heat pipes. Heat pipes are used to absorb the solar energy and evacuated tubes are used to prevent the convective losses. A selective absorber coating is used to coat the Inner side of the evacuated tube. Air is forced in to the duct of size 10cm x 10cm by a fan, which is driven by a photo voltaic panel. Six heat pipes and six evacuated tubes are used to absorb the solar radiation. A solar flux meter is used in to measure incoming solar radiation. Experiments are conducted with and without evacuated tubes. For both the configurations the variations of thermal efficiency with respect to time has been reported. The maximum thermal efficiency obtained is 35 % for evacuated tube with heat pipe. The average efficiency of evacuated tube with heat pipe is 1.5 times that of heat pipe alone.

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel collaborative educational game titled "Land of Hands", involving children and a customized social robot that we designed (HakshE). Through this gaming platform, we aim to teach proper hand hygiene practises to children and explore the extent of interactions that take place between a pro-social robot and children in such a setting. We blended gamification with Computers as Social Actors (CASA) paradigm to model the robot as a social actor or a fellow player in the game. The game was developed using Godot's 2D engine and Alice 3. In this study, 32 participants played the game online through a video teleconferencing platform Zoom. To understand the influence a pro-social robot's nudges has on children's interactions, we split our study into two conditions: With-Nudges and Without-Nudges. Detailed analysis of rubrics and video analyses of children's interactions show that our platform helped children learn good hand hygiene practises. We also found that using a pro-social robot creates enjoyable interactions and greater social engagement between the children and the robot although learning itself wasn't influenced by the pro-sociality of the robot.

We present the design of a minimalist interactive social robot named Haksh-E which integrates audiovisual perception with artificial intelligence to nurture positive behaviors in children. We co-designed the robot's embodiment with children acting as design informants. The robot features expressive interactions, real time conversation and human action detection capabilities. Haksh-E can assist children in learning new behaviors as a tutor, play a supportive role in health interventions and also pose as an objective assessor of various indicators of health and hygiene. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → HCI design and evaluation methods; Empirical studies in HCI ; Interaction design process and methods.

Young children are at an increased risk of contracting contagious diseases such as COVID-19 due to improper hand hygiene. An autonomous social agent that observes children while handwashing and encourages good hand washing practices could provide an opportunity for handwashing behavior to become a habit. In this article, we present a human action recognition system, which is part of the vision system of a social robot platform, to assist children in developing a correct handwashing technique. A modified convolution neural network (CNN) architecture with Channel Spatial Attention Bilinear Pooling (CSAB) frame, with a VGG-16 architecture as the backbone is trained and validated on an augmented dataset. The modified architecture generalizes well with an accuracy of 90% for the WHO-prescribed handwashing steps even in an unseen environment. Our findings indicate that the approach can recognize even subtle hand movements in the video and can be used for gesture detection and classification in social robotics.

We conducted an empirical study to co-design a social robot with children to bring about long-term behavioural changes. As a case study, we focused our efforts to create a social robot to promote handwashing in community settings while adhering to minimalistic design principles. Since cultural views influence design preferences and technology acceptance, we selected forty children from different socioeconomic backgrounds across India as informants for our design study. We asked the children to design paper mock-ups using pre-cut geometrical shapes to understand their mental models of such a robot. The children also shared their feedback on the eight resulting different conceptual designs of minimalistic caricatured social robots. Our findings show that children had varied expectations of the robot's emotional intelligence, interactions, and social roles even though it was being designed for a specific context of use. The children unequivocally liked and trusted anthropomorphized caricatured designs of everyday objects for the robot's morphology. Based on these findings, we present our recommendations for the physical and interaction features of a minimalist social robot assimilating the children's inputs and social robot design principles grounded in prior research. Future studies will examine the children's interactions with a built prototype. Keywords Child-robot interaction (CRI) • Social robot • Handwashing • Co-design • Human-robot interaction (HRI)

In this article, we present a proof of concept work for a Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) framework to help dyslexic children enhance their learning abilities. This is a preliminary study that focuses on providing aid with vital language skill sets by integrating four major learning styles namely, auditory, visual and bodily kin-aesthetic, reading, and writing styles. The CRI framework consists of four games, wherein in each game, the robot first provides instructions on how to play the game followed by the child and robot playing together to complete the game.

This paper presents the preliminary design and development of a generalized Child-Robot-Interaction framework involving interactive game-play between the socially assistive robot NAO and children with varying types of dyslexia. Our framework aims to enhance the learning and overall development of dyslexic children by integrating four vital modalities-auditory, visual and bodily kinaesthetic, reading and writing styles together into a set of four interactive games. These games, namely-Picture Memory (P), Sound and Read (S), Spelling (S) and Spatial (S) abbreviated as PSSS focus on aiding dyslexic children with their language skill sets such as reading, speaking, writing and listening, with the future goal being improving their mental well-being. Each of the games starts with the robot providing a set of instructions regarding the game to the child followed by the child playing the game with the robot. The PSSS games have been designed by taking prior literature and scientific data on child psychology, special education pedagogical methods, and linguistic studies into consideration. This research provides detailed experimental demonstrations of the design and working of the proposed framework. In the future, we intend to integrate the framework into real-time Human-Robot-Interaction studies to help children with special needs improve their mental health, confidence and ability to learn better.

We present “Snowventure: Love’n’Learn”, an educational video game integrated with a virtual social robot, “CommU”, to improve the global self-esteem of elementary school children. CommU provides constant positive encouragement and motivation to children throughout the game, celebrating their small wins and losses, along with helping them solve certain levels in the game. We discuss in detail, the development of the game, along with the design of the behaviour and dialogues of virtual CommU. We then present the suggestions we received from children in India, aged 9 - 10 years, as part of our pilot trial study on how to improve upon our existing framework.