Devasena Pasupuleti | Osaka University (original) (raw)

Papers by Devasena Pasupuleti

The 8th International Conference on Robotics and Automation Sciences: AI-Powered Robotics Advancements (ICRAS), 2024

This study evaluates the effectiveness of child-robot interactions with the HaKsh-E social robot ... more This study evaluates the effectiveness of child-robot interactions with the HaKsh-E social robot in India, examining both individual and group interaction settings. The research centers on game-based interactions designed to teach hand hygiene to children aged 7-11. Utilizing video analysis, rubric assessments, and post-study questionnaires, the study gathered data from 36 participants. Findings indicate that children in both settings developed positive perceptions of the robot in terms of the robot's trustworthiness, closeness, and social support. The significant difference in the interaction level scores presented in the study suggests that group settings foster higher levels of interaction, potentially due to peer influence and collaborative dynamics. While both settings showed significant improvements in learning outcomes, the individual setting had more pronounced learning gains. This suggests that personal interactions with the robot might lead to deeper or more effective learning experiences. Consequently, this study concludes that individual interaction settings are more conducive for focused learning gains, while group settings enhance interaction and engagement.

23rd annual ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, 2024

This paper presents a preliminary design and development of a novel wristband connected to a mobi... more This paper presents a preliminary design and development of a novel wristband connected to a mobile application to enhance social interaction among children aged 7-12 years who struggle with expressing themselves in group settings. Targeting pedagogical environments, the wristband can facilitate structured group discussions by allowing teachers to set parameters such as time limits via the app. Each child involved in the group discussion would wear an individual wristband, receiving notifications according to the set parameters. The system not only aids teachers in managing inclusive classroom discussions but also benefits parents by providing valuable insights into their child's social development. Moreover, it helps children build communication skills and confidence during group interactions. This innovative technology has the potential to positively impact educational settings by fostering inclusive happiness and a supportive environment for children's social and cognitive growth.

International Journal of Social Robotics, 2023

We conducted an empirical study to co-design a social robot with children to bring about long-ter... more We conducted an empirical study to co-design a social robot with children to bring about long-term behavioural changes. As a case study, we focused our efforts to create a social robot to promote handwashing in community settings while adhering to minimalistic design principles. Since cultural views influence design preferences and technology acceptance, we selected forty children from different socioeconomic backgrounds across India as informants for our design study. We asked the children to design paper mock-ups using pre-cut geometrical shapes to understand their mental models of such a robot. The children also shared their feedback on the eight resulting different conceptual designs of minimalistic caricatured social robots. Our findings show that children had varied expectations of the robot's emotional intelligence, interactions, and social roles even though it was being designed for a specific context of use. The children unequivocally liked and trusted anthropomorphized caricatured designs of everyday objects for the robot's morphology. Based on these findings, we present our recommendations for the physical and interaction features of a minimalist social robot assimilating the children's inputs and social robot design principles grounded in prior research. Future studies will examine the children's interactions with a built prototype. Keywords Child-robot interaction (CRI) • Social robot • Handwashing • Co-design • Human-robot interaction (HRI)

TENCON 2022: 2022 IEEE Region 10 International Conference, 2022

Young children are at an increased risk of contracting contagious diseases such as COVID-19 due t... more Young children are at an increased risk of contracting contagious diseases such as COVID-19 due to improper hand hygiene. An autonomous social agent that observes children while handwashing and encourages good hand washing practices could provide an opportunity for handwashing behavior to become a habit. In this article, we present a human action recognition system, which is part of the vision system of a social robot platform, to assist children in developing a correct handwashing technique. A modified convolution neural network (CNN) architecture with Channel Spatial Attention Bilinear Pooling (CSAB) frame, with a VGG-16 architecture as the backbone is trained and validated on an augmented dataset. The modified architecture generalizes well with an accuracy of 90% for the WHO-prescribed handwashing steps even in an unseen environment. Our findings indicate that the approach can recognize even subtle hand movements in the video and can be used for gesture detection and classification in social robotics.

ACM SIGGRAPH 2022 Educator's Forum, 2022

We present the design of a minimalist interactive social robot named Haksh-E which integrates aud... more We present the design of a minimalist interactive social robot named Haksh-E which integrates audiovisual perception with artificial intelligence to nurture positive behaviors in children. We co-designed the robot's embodiment with children acting as design informants. The robot features expressive interactions, real time conversation and human action detection capabilities. Haksh-E can assist children in learning new behaviors as a tutor, play a supportive role in health interventions and also pose as an objective assessor of various indicators of health and hygiene. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → HCI design and evaluation methods; Empirical studies in HCI ; Interaction design process and methods.

2022 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2022

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel collaborative education... more This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel collaborative educational game titled "Land of Hands", involving children and a customized social robot that we designed (HakshE). Through this gaming platform, we aim to teach proper hand hygiene practises to children and explore the extent of interactions that take place between a pro-social robot and children in such a setting. We blended gamification with Computers as Social Actors (CASA) paradigm to model the robot as a social actor or a fellow player in the game. The game was developed using Godot's 2D engine and Alice 3. In this study, 32 participants played the game online through a video teleconferencing platform Zoom. To understand the influence a pro-social robot's nudges has on children's interactions, we split our study into two conditions: With-Nudges and Without-Nudges. Detailed analysis of rubrics and video analyses of children's interactions show that our platform helped children learn good hand hygiene practises. We also found that using a pro-social robot creates enjoyable interactions and greater social engagement between the children and the robot although learning itself wasn't influenced by the pro-sociality of the robot.

This dataset contains images and segmentation maps for sevenhandwashing steps, six of which are p... more This dataset contains images and segmentation maps for sevenhandwashing steps, six of which are prescirbed WHO handwashing steps.This work is based on a sample handwashing video dataset uploadedby Kaggle userreal-timeAR (https://www.kaggle.com/realtimear) .Class-wise breakdown of samples---Step_1 : 8749Step_2 : 18725Step_3 : 7516Step_4 : 19926Step_5 : 18696Step_6 : 17274Step_7 : 16163------------------Total : 107049 images------------------

KIIT THERMO 2020- International Conference, 2020

The demand for energy is increasing worldwide and the best way to meet this demand is a clean ren... more The demand for energy is increasing worldwide and the best way to meet this demand is a clean renewable energy source. Among the various options available solar energy can be considered as the best renewable energy source. This paper deals with design, fabrication and performance study of a solar air heater coupled with evacuated tubes and heat pipes. Heat pipes are used to absorb the solar energy and evacuated tubes are used to prevent the convective losses. A selective absorber coating is used to coat the Inner side of the evacuated tube. Air is forced in to the duct of size 10cm x 10cm by a fan, which is driven by a photo voltaic panel. Six heat pipes and six evacuated tubes are used to absorb the solar radiation. A solar flux meter is used in to measure incoming solar radiation. Experiments are conducted with and without evacuated tubes. For both the configurations the variations of thermal efficiency with respect to time has been reported. The maximum thermal efficiency obtained is 35 % for evacuated tube with heat pipe. The average efficiency of evacuated tube with heat pipe is 1.5 times that of heat pipe alone.

Congress on Intelligent Systems- International Conference(CIS 2020), 2021

Autonomous and remotely controlled mobile robots are used extensively in industries and are slowl... more Autonomous and remotely controlled mobile robots are used extensively in industries and are slowly becoming a norm in day-today life. They can be manually controlled using devices such as joysticks or by using mobile phone applications, through Bluetooth or similar technologies. In this paper, the authors propose usage of Leap Motion device which can track hands of human users. By using the gestures, the human can operate a mobile robot. For the demonstration, the authors propose its usage on a 3 Omni-wheel based mobile platform. First, the mathematical model of the robot was formulated and simulated in V-REP software for various types of motion. Then, a physical prototype was developed, which was integrated with both Bluetooth based mobile phone application and Leap Motion device. Field trials and survey of 30 people was carried out, where both methods were perceived to be of similar ease of use and intuitiveness. However, the authors feel the results of Leap Motion control may improve with subsequent usage by the users.

IPRoMM 2020- BITS Hyderabad-International Conference, 2021

Mobile wheeled robots are used for various applications such as moving payload from one place to ... more Mobile wheeled robots are used for various applications such as moving payload from one place to another. In many instances, the orientation of the robotic platform does not change and hence for those applications, it is desired to have platforms which just have translational degrees-of-freedom and does not have rotation about the vertical axis (yaw rotation). In this paper, the authors propose two architectures of the platform that have two active and two passive wheels. Simulation in V-REP software was carried out and physical prototypes were developed and tested to validate the effectiveness of the proposed platforms. One of the proposed design fits perfectly for a pure translation mobile platform.

Conference Presentations by Devasena Pasupuleti

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Yokohama, Japan, 2024

We present “Snowventure: Love’n’Learn”, an educational video game integrated with a virtual socia... more We present “Snowventure: Love’n’Learn”, an educational video game integrated with a virtual social robot, “CommU”, to improve the global self-esteem of elementary school children. CommU provides constant positive encouragement and motivation to children throughout the game, celebrating their small wins and losses, along with helping them solve certain levels in the game. We discuss in detail, the development of the game, along with the design of the behaviour and dialogues of virtual CommU. We then present the suggestions we received from children in India, aged 9 - 10 years, as part of our pilot trial study on how to improve upon our existing framework.

2nd Edition of the HRI4Wellbeing Workshop, IEEE RO-MAN 2023, 2023

This paper presents the preliminary design and development of a generalized Child-Robot-Interacti... more This paper presents the preliminary design and development of a generalized Child-Robot-Interaction framework involving interactive game-play between the socially assistive robot NAO and children with varying types of dyslexia. Our framework aims to enhance the learning and overall development of dyslexic children by integrating four vital modalities-auditory, visual and bodily kinaesthetic, reading and writing styles together into a set of four interactive games. These games, namely-Picture Memory (P), Sound and Read (S), Spelling (S) and Spatial (S) abbreviated as PSSS focus on aiding dyslexic children with their language skill sets such as reading, speaking, writing and listening, with the future goal being improving their mental well-being. Each of the games starts with the robot providing a set of instructions regarding the game to the child followed by the child playing the game with the robot. The PSSS games have been designed by taking prior literature and scientific data on child psychology, special education pedagogical methods, and linguistic studies into consideration. This research provides detailed experimental demonstrations of the design and working of the proposed framework. In the future, we intend to integrate the framework into real-time Human-Robot-Interaction studies to help children with special needs improve their mental health, confidence and ability to learn better.

7th International Workshop on Robots for Learning (R4L) at HRI 2023, 2023

In this article, we present a proof of concept work for a Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) framework... more In this article, we present a proof of concept work for a Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) framework to help dyslexic children enhance their learning abilities. This is a preliminary study that focuses on providing aid with vital language skill sets by integrating four major learning styles namely, auditory, visual and bodily kin-aesthetic, reading, and writing styles. The CRI framework consists of four games, wherein in each game, the robot first provides instructions on how to play the game followed by the child and robot playing together to complete the game.

IROS - Workshop on The Roles of Robotics in Achieving the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, 2021

We present Haksh-E, a social robot for promoting good hand hygiene among children. This robot can... more We present Haksh-E, a social robot for promoting good hand hygiene among children. This robot can supply valuable objective data to stakeholders and the UN to monitor progress on targets for UN SDGs 3 and 6. We discuss the design parameters of Haksh-E and a pilot study conducted with 10 children between the ages 6-11 years hailing from rural and urban locations in Southern India. The children provide insights on their perception and acceptance of our robot prototype over various dimensions including likeability, perceived intelligence, anthropomorphism, trustworthiness, age, and gender. Our results suggest that Haksh-E has the potential to be used in educational and children-centered spaces to promote handwashing behavior change.