Providing tablets as collaborative-task workspace for human-robot interaction

In a recent conference on assistive technology in special education and rehabilitation, over 54 percentage of the sessions were directly or indirectly involved with tablets. Following this trend, many traditional assistive technologies are now transitioning from standalone devices into apps on mobile devices. As such, this paper follows this trend by discussing transforming a tablet into an HRI research platform where our robotic system engages the user in social interaction by learning how to operate a given app (task) using guidance from the user. The objective is to engage the robot within the context of the user´s task by understanding the task´s underlying rules and structures. An overview of the HRI toolkit is presented and a knowledge-based approach in modeling a task is discussed where previously learned cases are reused to solve a new problem.