ClassMate Robot: A Robot to Support Teaching and Learning Activities in Schools

Educational robotics is a field aiming at investigating the use of robots in schools to support teaching and learning activities. While several robotic solutions exist in support of the STEM teaching activities, in this work, we present "Classmate Robot" as a new social robot to be used in the classrooms as a support to the learning experience through interaction. Classmate Robot has been designed and developed to improve the effectiveness of the activities by providing a framework where the robot’s behaviors can be personalized, and learning applications can be easily integrated on top of the robot interaction capabilities. This approach aims to increase the engagement of learners. We introduce the ROS-based architecture developed that is divided into three main layers plus an application layer. As a social robot, it combines several multimodal social cues to interact and communicate with students and teachers. Moreover, the robot is endowed with a set of behaviors designed to be compliant with its role of "classmate" in the interaction with the students.