Interactive spaces for children: gesture elicitation for controlling ground mini-robots

Abstract

Interactive spaces for education are emerging as a mechanism for fostering children's natural ways of learning by means of play and exploration in physical spaces. The advanced interactive modalities and devices for such environments need to be both motivating and intuitive for children. Among the wide variety of interactive mechanisms, robots have been a popular research topic in the context of educational tools due to their attractiveness for children. However, few studies have focused on how children would naturally interact and explore interactive environments with robots. While there is abundant research on full-body interaction and intuitive manipulation of robots by adults, no similar research has been done with children. This paper therefore describes a gesture elicitation study that identified the preferred gestures and body language communication used by children to control ground robots. The results of the elicitation study were used to define a gestural language that covers the different preferences of the gestures by age group and gender, with a good acceptance rate in the 6-12 age range. The study also revealed interactive spaces with robots using body gestures as motivating and promising scenarios for collaborative or remote learning activities. Highlights:•A gesture elicitation study on children manipulating ground robots is described • A full body gestural language for children to control ground robots is defined • Interactive scenarios using body gestures with robots are motivating for children

Usability evaluation of mechatronic system by primary school children

“…In another case [14] the interaction of children was analyzed with the help of gestures that showed a good percentage of acceptance of the new means of communication. The children were found to have great motivation for the activity and the ease of interaction was assessed as very positive [9]. The work of Nacher, Garcia-Sanjuan and Jaen showed that in young children and around the age of 6, it is difficult to interact with mechatronic systems.…”

Eliciting Sketched Expressions of Command Intentions in an IDE

“…4.2 below. This method has been used in many elicitation studies focusing on gesture elicitation in particular [1,6,10,11,17,36,38,40,44,45,53], and was our method of choice due to the similarity of gestures and sketches for expressing commands, as discussed in Sect. 2.4.…”

Investigation of User Interface of Gyro-Sensor-Based Hand Gestural Drone Controller

“…Consequently, many studies have proposed approaches to reduce robot control mental workloads using NUIs [11][12][13]. Various NUI approaches have suggested robot control interfaces that are easier to understand and learn [14][15][16][17], and have focused on improving the robot control experience and usability [18][19][20][21]. Therefore drone control interfaces that are closer to natural human behaviour will improve mental workload, learnability, and usability.…”