Humanoid Robots in Education: A~Short~Review

Abstract

Robots are becoming useful parts of the education ecosystem with their various capabilities ranging from the ability to perceive people and their environment to the ability to reason and rationalize situations and emotions of people. These robots are also equipped with multimodal interaction capabilities and, equally important, have a physical presence. Humanoid robots, with their humanlike appearance, add another dimension of humanlike body language and social signaling capabilities: keys for more natural and intuitive human-robotEducational A.K. Pandey ( ) • R. Gelin Innovation Department, SoftBank Robotics Europe, Paris, France e-mail: akpandey@softbankrobotics.com; rgelin@softbankrobotics.com © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017 A. Goswami, P. Vadakkepat (eds.), Humanoid Robotics: A Reference, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7194-9_113-1 1 2 A.K. Pandey and R. Gelin robots interaction. This chapter presents the applications of humanoid robots in education. The aim of this chapter is not to provide a complete review of all ongoing research works in robot-in-the-loop education but to create awareness about various educationally oriented applications of humanoid robots. The chapter will also discuss the set of the key capabilities such robots should possess, some major R&D challenges, and some ethical and social issues. Therefore, the chapter aims to serve as basis for further investigation for the interested readers.