Maggie: A Social Robot as a Gaming Platform

Abstract

Edutainment robots are robots designed to participate in people's education and in their entertainment. One of the tasks of edutainment robots is to play with their human partners, but most of them offer a limited pool of games. Moreover, it is difficult to add new games to them. This lack of flexibility could shorten their life cycle. This paper presents a social robot on which several robotic games have been developed. Our robot uses a flexible and modular architecture that allows the creation of new skills by the composition of existing and simpler skills. With this architecture, the development of a new game mainly consists in the composition of the skills that are needed for this specific game. In this paper, we present the robot, its hardware and its software architecture, including its interaction capabilities. We also provide a detailed description of the development of five of the games the robot can play.

A Systematic Review of Adaptivity in Human-Robot Interaction

“…Gonazalez et al, 2011 [35] presented an autonomous Maggie robot that was programmed to play different games (Peekaboo, Guessing the character, Hangman, Tic tac toe, and Animal Quiz) with children in order to promote edutainment. Maggie robot constitutes Voice System (ASR, TTS), Vision System (Object Identification), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Touch Sensors, built-in tablet screens along with interactions via smart phones, and engagement gestures.…”

Study of Scenarios and Technical Requirements of a Social Assistive Robot for Alzheimer’s Disease Patients and Their Caregivers

“…In this scenario, the robot has a collection of stories, curiosities, poems, facts or events of the patient's life that it relates to the patient (a first approach of this idea was presented in [19]). The story can be chosen by the caregiver or autonomously by the robot based on a dynamic record of the patient's favorite stories.…”

“…The database must be programmable with several information about the patient: it has to be secure for his privacy and also easy to program by the caregiver 5,6,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,19,20 LAN or Internet connection Connection depends on external factors and may be lost. The quality of the signal may not be good in all rooms of the house 3, 4, 7, 16, 17…”

“…Difficult for the robot to assess the realization of an activity 8,19,20 Incoherence between patient's questions and robot's answers can lead to disappointment 5,6,9,10,11,14 Patient can get bored, what is difficult to detect by the robot 12,13,14,15,16,17 The bond between the patient and the robot could be demanding and stressing for him 18 Exercises must be designed specifically for the patient 19,20 since it only can be moved by the caregiver, thus controlling what the robot is watching at any time.…”

A Robot-Based Tool for Physical and Cognitive Rehabilitation of Elderly People Using Biofeedback

“…The objective of SARs is to provide some form of close and effective interaction with the user. Many projects can be found in this area, such as the Maggie robot [9], which is able to perform multiple activities like reading a book to blind people, helping elderly people move or even acting as a playmate. There is another project being carried out by the University of Southern California, whose purpose is to provide instructions, evaluation and to encourage users to perform arm exercises [10,11,12].…”