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Active Participation in Lectures via a Collaboratively Controlled Robot

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Abstract

Information technology, including digital devices, robots, and the internet, is of great interest in the field of education. Many previous studies have focused on improving lecturer–student communication during lectures. In this paper, we describe a new robot-teleoperation system for transferring students’ opinions or questions to the lecturer. Through this system, users can collaboratively choose a message to be uttered by a robot. We report the results of a subjective experiment performed in a controlled lecture-style environment. The results show that participation, as estimated from behavioral and subjective measures, increased in lectures using the proposed system compared with those that did not use the proposed system or employed a reduced version of the proposed system in which the robot was controlled individually (i.e., non-collaboratively).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grant Number 18H04114 and JST-Mirai Program Grant Number JPMJMI18C6, Japan.

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Correspondence to Jiro Shimaya.

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Yuichiro Yoshikawa and Hiroshi Ishiguro serve as consultants of Vstone Co. Ltd.

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In this study, ethical approval was received from Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University.

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Shimaya, J., Yoshikawa, Y., Palinko, O. et al. Active Participation in Lectures via a Collaboratively Controlled Robot. Int J of Soc Robotics 13, 587–598 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-020-00651-y

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