Student Well-being-Companionship-Robot

Student Well-being-Companionship-Robot The global pandemic has extremely affected the wellbeing of children. From having lockdown measures and reduced human to human contact has left children feeling lonely. Research has shown that quarantine measures of isolation can lead to long term psychological consequences of their wellbeing.This means having someone/something they feel close to and comforted by.

The purpose of this project is to create a wellbeing companion robot Humanioud robot Nao V6 for primary school pupils to be used during the COVID-19 pandemic. It will focus on the aspect of:

Emotional expression To be able to provide a companionship and engagement activity with pupils by giving a simple feedback in terms of some facial emotion such as Happiness, sadness, angry, surprised or shocked and Neutral extraction.

Age recognition

• To be able to interact with different children of different primary school age.

Face recognition

• To be able to recognise different facial expressions to provide a response, enabling non-verbal communication.

Object recognition

• To be able to recognise different objects for the better understanding of things that surrounds it.

Other features of the robot include telling jokes and body expressions to interact with a pupil to brighten up their day and be friends. The end goal of this companion robot is to ensure that the child does not feel lonely since they have a robotic friend.

[Watch the demo on youtube (https://youtu.be/nXKKdrhWdhs)]

About NAO

Nao (pronounced now) is an autonomous, programmable humanoid robot developed by Aldebaran Robotics. Aldebaran Roboticswas acquired by Japan's SoftBank Mobile in 2013.

Nao robots have been used for research and education purposes in numerous academic institutions worldwide.

NAO6: the Aldebaran’s robot equipped with NAOqi 2.8

Programmable humanoid NAO6 specifications:

Dimensions: 574x 311x 275 mm (22.6 x 10.8 x 12.2 inches) Weight: 5.48 Kg (12,08 lb)

Autonomy: 60 minutes in active use et 90 minutes in normal use

Degrees of freedom: 25

Processor: Intel Atom E3845

Built-in OS: Linux (Gentoo)

Compatible OS: Windows, Mac OS, Linux

Programming languages:

Embedded: C++, Python

Remote: Java

Vision: 2 OV5640 2592x1944 cameras

Connectivity: Ethernet, Wi-Fi