Robots as an embodied, multi-modal technology have great potential to be used as a new type of communication device. In this paper we outline our development of the Huggable robot as a semi-autonomous robot avatar for two specific types of remote interaction family communication and education. We also describe three different operator control interfaces (Web Interface, Wearable Interface, and S...

The evaluation of the school performance is a very important strategic field due to the great amount of public and private resources invested by the society in the non-university education. State and regional governments undergo several tests and surveys which try to measure the levels of learning attained by their students. While there is a rich literature on the main inputs that explain the s...

Education is challenged nowadays with the important for survival goal of facilitating change and learning. New meanings are now attributed to education such as learning how to learn rather than acquiring new knowledge (Rogers, 1983). In a constantly changing situation, where reliance on static knowledge does not make sense anymore, it is important to help students to develop autonomous ways of ...

Although construction has been known as a highly complex application field for autonomous robotic systems, recent advances in this field offer great hope for using robotic capabilities to develop automated construction. Today, space research agencies seek to build infrastructures without human intervention, and construction companies look to robots with the potential to improve construction qua...

The purpose of this study was to test a motivational model of the coach-athlete relationship, based on self-determination theory and on the hierarchical model of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The sample comprised of 608 athletes (ages of 12-17 years) completed the following measures: interest in athlete's input, praise for autonomous behavior, perceived autonomy, intrinsic motivation, and...

Prototyping and validating hardware–software components, sub-systems systems within the intelligent transportation system-of-systems framework requires a modular yet flexible open-access ecosystem. This work presents our attempt to develop such comprehensive research education ecosystem, called AutoDRIVE, for synergistically prototyping, simulating deploying cyber-physical solutions pertaining ...

How can educators empower and encourage their students to be more proactive, and give them the tools necessary to learn on their own, utilizing digital language learning resources in a culturally sensitive way? Described below is a project that introduced students to how technology and the Internet can empower the independent language learner. The goal was for the students to develop knowledge ...

l Exploration of remote environments, once the domain of intrepid adventurers, can now be conducted in relative safety using unmanned vehicles. This article describes the joint University of Michigan (UMich) and Michigan Tech Research Institute’s project to design and to build a new autonomous surface vessel (ASV) for use in research, education, and resource management as well as in the commerc...

in the procedure of designing an underwater vehicle or robot, its maneuverability and controllability must be simulated and tested, before the product is finalized for manufacturing. since the hydrodynamic forces and moments highly affect the dynamic and maneuverability of the system, they must be estimated with a reasonable accuracy. in this study, hydrodynamic coefficients of an autonomous un...