Communications of the ACM
Your Next Opponent in Angry Birds Could Be a Robot
Researchers see their system as a future rehabilitation tool for children with cognitive and motor-skill disabilities.
Credit: Georgia Tech News Center
A combination robot/smart-tablet system could become a future rehabilitation tool for children with cognitive and motor-skill disabilities.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) have paired a small humanoid robot with an Android tablet, enabling children to easily program the robot to play Angry Birds. The robot observes how the child plays the game and then mimics the movements, celebrates when it scores points, and even adjusts its playing strategy.
"One way to get robots more quickly into society is to design them to be flexible for end users," notes Georgia Tech's Hae Won Park. "If a robot is only trained to perform a specific set of tasks and not able to learn and adapt to its owner or surroundings, its usefulness can become extremely limited."
A clinician could program the robot to address a child's needs, such as hand-eye coordination tasks, and then send the tablet home.
During testing, the researchers say grade-school children played Angry Birds nearly three times as long with the robot when an adult was not watching, and interacted nearly 40 percent of the session with the robot and only 7 percent with the adult.
From Georgia Tech News Center
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