Towards Effective Robot Tutoring for Skills Acquisition

Effective tutoring during skill learning requires to
provide the appropriate physical assistance to the learners, but at
the same time to assess and adapt to their affective state to avoid
frustration. With the aim of endowing robot tutors with these
abilities, we designed an experiment to evaluate how training with
a humanoid social robot influenced the performance, experience,
and communicative behavior of naive learners. Participants had
to learn to balance an unstable inverted pendulum with the
support of physical assistance. The presence of the humanoid
robot increased the involvement in the task. Moreover monitoring
participants’ facial expressions proved helpful to recognize when
the task was particularly challenging. These findings will enable
the robot to adapt its tutoring strategy to the learner’s needs in
real-time.