This week we met with Hadas, our mentor in the research seminar. At this meeting we were trying to decide on a definitive goal for the project.
After an open discussion, we came to the conclusion that we want to improve the interaction between the driver and the passenger so that passengers will be more polite to the driver.
We came to this conclusion based on the interviews we did last week. Many drivers feel that the respect and courtesy of their passengers has been decreasing over the years, and they often feel transparent in front of passengers who board their bus.
We began researching social robots and hand/face gestures that can lead to a behavioral change.
In studies we found that the presence of such a social robot can lead to an improvement in the interaction between the people involved in the interaction.
We came to understand that a social robot can teach people to be more polite to the driver through classical positive reinforcement.
When the robot hears someone speaking politely to the driver, it will respond to that passenger with a gesture, change in color, or some other form of response.
The gestures can vary depending on the passenger’s behavior.
The operant conditioning in this project is that the robot will give gestures as a kind of reward only to people who are polite and respect the driver. The robot will determine this by listening to polite words (hi, hello, thanks, good morning, good day) in the hope that the positive reinforcement for a polite traveler will lead to more passengers learning to do the same.
We also made a new storyboard for our robot:
Moreover, we worked on a logo for our robot, which is called Dapi :)
