RoboBeggar: Teaching Attitudes by Robotics

A human size interacting robot called RoboBeggar is a dedicated learning appliance capable of bankcard-based swift money transfers, providing information on relevant issues, giving advice on how to contribute to help needy people. RoboBeggar helps people to understand where and why resources are needed. Thanks to a bankcard reader it gives the facility to donate money in a quick and efficient way. Both charity organisations as well as donors benefit from this interdisciplinary project with flavours of education, robotics, cognitive science and computer science. 1. Robot Structure: Technical architecture RoboBeggar consists of different kinds of pieces of hardware and software. Hereafter are considered the various parts of the robot: 1.Software. The software controls the behaviour, the communications, the transactions and other components of RoboBeggar. The robot also contains an e-learning module that introduces the user to the current issues of poverty and exposes famine of a selection of developing countries. In this way it tries to make the user more sensitive to these issues. 2. Touch Screen. The user mainly interacts with the system by using a touch screen. All the information is shown on the screen and the user selects the operations by touching the screen at appropriate places. 3. Card Reader. The card reader will read the bankcard’s magnetic tape and use that information to charge the right bank account. The amount of the money will be decided by the user and given to the software that controls the card reader. The card reader will handle the connection from RoboBeggar to the bank with a GSM connection. 4. Micro Controller and Motors. Motors are needed in order to make the robot move its arms and head. Motors are controlled through a programmable microchip, a micro controller that will get the orders from the software through a serial port. These commands are then interpreted in the micro controller and the motors are controlled accordingly. The robot will have some gestures that are connected with the sound card and speakers. 5. Sound Card and Speakers are needed so that the robot can talk or give some aural feedback to the users. This will make the robot more humane. 6. Printer will print a receipt after the donation has occurred. Some components of the robot are already complicated in themselves but when they are connected with each other the issues get even more complicated. For example, the software will need to concurrently control the motors and the speech of the robot to make the speaking as natural as possible and control the software itself as well. 2. How can a robot help in learning responsible behaviour? RoboBeggar is a combined creation that has been possible thanks to the integration of everyday educational needs to state-of-art control technology. Without the related forming analysis RoboBeggar would have remained a piece of hardware. RoboBeggar interactivity gives that kind of excitement to the user that encourages him/her to know more. On one side RoboBeggar provides a mean to charity organisations to give exact and up-to-date information to potential donors. On the other side potential donors have the opportunity to see concretely what will be the impact of their donation, where their money is going to be invested and what kinds of results their donation is going to produce concretely. Seeing, hearing it and being informed by the robot about a specific developing situation will encourage donations. This is the added value of technology to charity collecting. Furthermore, RoboBeggar represents a family of learning appliances which can be located in places people use to spend their free time, like supermarkets or malls. Proceedings of the The 3rd IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’03) 0-7695-1967-9/03 $17.00 © 2003 IEEE