Development of system for facilitating participant’s voluntary comment in robot lectures

Abstract

In this study, we performed the robot lectures in which a robot as a teacher interacts with participants. There are many participants who answer the robot questions, but there are few participants who ask questions. The reason can be found in what participants are daunted by being worried about the opinions of others and hesitate to ask questions. For sharing the comments or questions, we propose that all participants can see the questions of others and the robot reads them out. To relieve hesitation, we propose that the robot posts shill questions to look like some participants ask questions. Furthermore, we develop a system that allows participants to easily send their opinions by pushing buttons down to agree with comments of others. As an experiment, we perform two demonstrations of robot lectures. We discuss the effectiveness of the proposed robot system.