Abstract
In this paper we present a novel approach to programme Kaspar, a 22 DOF humanoid robot used for robot-assisted therapy with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The original software used to programme Kaspar was developed to primarily be used in research. However, Kaspar is now used increasingly in other environments, operated by non-roboticists. While Kaspar has a user-friendly interface to be operated by non-programmers, new games or behaviours were mainly created by the research team; thus, we needed to develop an interface that would allow non-roboticists to programme Kaspar.
As a solution, we used the Scratch programming language. We tested the Scratch interface with over 170 school children aged 7 to 10, who had the chance to programme Kaspar and give their feedback. In general terms, Scratch was thought to be a fun, useful and easy way to programme Kaspar, and the majority of the children were willing to use it again.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Dr. Gabriella Lakatos, Dr. Patrick Holthaus and Alessandra Rossi for their assistance in the schools’ robotics sessions.
This work has been funded by the BabyRobot project, supported by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme, under grant 687831.
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Moros, S., Wood, L., Robins, B., Dautenhahn, K., Castro-González, Á. (2020). Programming a Humanoid Robot with the Scratch Language. In: Merdan, M., Lepuschitz, W., Koppensteiner, G., Balogh, R., Obdržálek, D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1023. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26945-6_20
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