Multifunctional Humanoid Robot

Abstract

This thesis explores how to turn a robot into a multipurpose social robot. The robot will be used to education, exhibition displays and everyday socialization. To establish proof of concept for each of the methods, they will be tested in real applications with a limited size. For education the hypothesis is if it is possible to have the robot perform one task beneficiary to students and teacher without decreasing academic value. To test this hypothesis the robot holds a short lecture for fifth and sixth graders, and the attendants answers a questionnaire twice, both before and after the lecture. The improvement in answers is compared to a group who has a teacher giving a lecture with the exact same content. The result showed that the robot does not perform inferior to the teacher in improving knowledge and the robot consumed far less time to hold the lecture. The conclusion is that a short robot given lecture does not decrease academic value.

For exhibition the robot dances, moves and makes sounds to capture the attention of by passers, then let them try interactions in form of the robot tracking a red ball and the robot mimicking their movements via Kinect for Windows. If they are interested in working with robots or automation, the robot has a presentation about the automation engineering programme at NTNU Ålesund including admission requirements and deadlines. The conclusion is that the robot can be used to draw attention, which can be utilized to inform about engineering educations.