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When Form Meets Function: Embodiment Choices for Social Robotics
Description
Look at the robots below. Which applications do you envision for each robot? Which target group comes to mind? Which scenario is it used in?
Which robot would you choose to support children learning at school? Which one to have a chat with an older adult in a nursing home? Which one to explain artificial intelligence to visitors in a museum?
Researchers in the social robotics community are often faced with these questions. Answering this is particularly challenging when considering the limited choices of robots they have on the market. But what is actually the deciding factor when choosing a robot for a project or a study? Whether it has arms and legs? How cute it looks? Which modalities it can use for interaction?
Objectives
In this thesis you will design and conduct a study comparing different social robots for different application scenarios and analyze what a diverse group of people thinks on this topic.
This thesis will give you the opportunity to work and interact with different social robots, learn (or improve your skills on) how to conduct user studies, and work on providing an answer to a question that has been plaguing the social robotics community for years.
Requirements
This thesis requires you to have basic programming skills, as you will be preparing different scenarios with different robots which may have different SDKs and programming languages (e.g., Python, Kotlin, Java). Experience with quantitative analyses and statistics, particularly for user studies, is a plus but not a requirement.
Thesis Type
B.Sc. or M.Sc.
Starting Date
Flexible. Contact the supervisor of this thesis if you are interested.