NFC Robotrainer: Providing Care and Training for Children with Disabilities

1. NFC Robotrainer IlyaVoevodin Astrakhan State University Head of Internet Technologies Dpt. Instructor

2. Agenda / content • Project Idea and Background • Innovations and Benefits • Who are we? • Project Description • Training Suggestions • Building Consortium

3. NFC Robotrainer Project idea Provide care and training support for children with disabilities with inexpensive robot-supported artificial limited environment. Why bother? There are many children with disabilities in the world who don’t receive normal education and don’t adapt to the environment because there are the problems with availability of appropriate tutor, high educational costs, imperfect hostel abilities.

4. NFC Robotrainer What is novel about it? 1. Flexible maintainable robot-supported environment that implements various training programs; 2. Monitoring of children behavior by means of sensing abilities of robot-supported environment. Who will benefit and how? 1. Children; 2. Parents; 3. Tutors; 4. Educational institutes and R&D centers; 5. Researchers of children’s behavior, children’s psychologists.

5. NFC Robotrainer Who am I? I am the senior researcher in mobile robot control systems development in the Astrakhan State University. We have the high competent commands that specialize in microprocessor control systems development, database development, wireless networks and system integration. Also, we have commands of researchers in children training domain. But we need extra competence in various domains of robotics, sensing and technical vision systems.

6. NFC Robotrainer Hardware and software system of training children with disabilities to discern the colors, forms and symbols with the help of robot that identifies the objects and orients by NFC/RFID or FlashCode tags. Consists of robot that able to catch and transfer the items (special colored and formed toys with imprinted images on theirs surface and built-in information tags), PDA that identifies tags by built-in reader, computer that controls the training programs and (optionally) PDA for robot control by a teacher.

7. NFC Robotrainer Robotic system that uses information tags for recognition the type and character of item and navigates the robot in the training area by the orthogonal matrix of tags. Increases the clearness of children teaching, makes the teaching more interactive and visual, attracts children to studying process because of using interactive playing forms of education with innovative technology application.

8. NFC Robotrainer

9. Controlling computer Robot control program busy done ready Architecture of Prototype Robot Control System Building of the route Command analysis forward/left/right/ stop/up/down Controlling computer’s interface Robot’s Interface ok/error Autonomous searching of object

10. NFC Robotrainer NFC Robotrainer application is a special education trainer system for young children with disabilities. NFC Robotrainer allows teaching children to distinguish the colors, forms and symbols imprinted on surface of special items like children's cubes. Education may use one of the various methods, such as described below.

11. NFC Robotrainer Prototype of NFC Robotrainer uses the Bioloid™ robotic solution (Robotis Co., Ltd) to create the programmable interactive robot with actuators and sensors and to develop the software to control it. Robot communicates with training computer via wireless ZigBee interface. Robot carries the PDA or cell phone with built-in NFC-reader that communicates with NFC/RFID tags when they appear within the bounds of communication range.

12. NFC Robotrainer Training computer receives and interprets commands from teacher or interprets whole education program automatically and transfers to robot specific instructions to move the specified items. Also the training computer receives the information from robot's PDA/cell phone about tag recognition, navigates the robot and controls its behavior.

13. NFC Robotrainer Computer navigates robot between NFC/RFID tag designated points. Thus, robot navigates within the training area. Robot's PDA or cell phone with built-in NFC-reader are also programmed to identify an item by NFC/RFID tag and transfer information to trainer computer via Bluetooth / WiFi wireless interface. Computer instructs the robot to catch item and move it to new destination point. The additional PDA can play the role of training computer with better mobility and teacher convenience.

14. NFC Robotrainer Education process with the help of NFC Robotrainer may use the various methods. One of the possible methods described below. Teacher selects the item and demonstrates it to child. Then robot finds the item and transfers it to a new position. Child takes the item and puts it to a subsequent position. If child’s selection is right, robot will catch the item and show if the child’s decision is correct.

15. Building Consortium Potential partners: ELIKO, Estonia – embedded systems (Alar Kuusik) Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain – image processing, pattern recognition (Aleksandar Jevitć) National Institute of Telecommunications, Poland – ontologies, environment modeling (Mariusz Pajer M.Sc)

16. Thank you IlyaVoevodin Phone: +7(8512) 61-08-40 Fax: +7(8512) 54-90-99 e-mail: voevodin@aspu.ru Astrakhan State University www.aspu.ru