‘Robota’: A Robot To Help Special Kids Communicate About Their Problems

A group of second-year students from Rutgers College in New York has developed a robot, named "Robota" which can communicate with kids who require special attention due to stress related issues. This initiative from the sophomores came at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New York yesterday.

According to TechCrunch, the sophomores introduced Robota, the social robot which uses computer vision and sentiment analysis for the identification of distressed students in a classroom. Then it approaches the student and asks if there is anything wrong with him/her.

 After the student confides, Robota converts the problems into texts and analyzes whether the kid needs any immediate attention of an adult. Robota then informs the parents of the kid via text messages with a summary of the complaint. The identification of kids with stress issues is done by the use of prescient and sentiment evaluation by Robota.

According to Viral Inside, Abdullah Shareef, Aditya Shastri and Rithika Korrapolu are the three students who developed this new technology. Talking about the stress related issues among kids, they said that kids are vulnerable to this problem and often they experience difficulties to approach the adults or the teacher. This is where Robota is going to make a huge a difference, as talking about their problems to a robot will take out the judgmental factor that we often experience in human behavior.

Judging people by their problems can discourage them from sharing with others, thus the team developed Robota with the special technology that makes it nonjudgmental. The prototype of Robota has been made by using the TurtleBot, the developers also used the software Autonomous, Clarif.ai and IBM. This is not the first time a machine or a robot is being used to help humans.

Prior to Robota, Paro was a robotic seal designed to assist people with Dementia. NAO was a humanoid robot that is being used to help kids with autism. Also, there is a companion robot, named ElliQ from Intuition Robotics which was developed to help the elderly people as the age. With the latest creation of Robota, we hope the growing distress problem among kids will come to an end.