“Let There Be Intelligence!”- A Novel Cognitive Architecture for Teaching Assistant Social Robots

Abstract

This paper endeavors to propose a novel cognitive architecture specialized for Teaching Assistant (TA) social robotic platforms. Designing such architectures could lead to a more systematic approach in using TA robots. The proposed architecture consists of four main blocks: Perception, Memory, Logic and Action Units. The designed cognitive architecture would help robots to perform a variety of visual, acoustic, and spatial sub-tasks based on cognitive theories and modern educational methods. It also provides a way to enable an operator to control the robot with defined plans and teaching scenarios. The proposed architecture is modular, minimalistic, extendable, and ROS compatible. This architecture can help teaching-assistant robots to be involved in common/expected educational scenarios, systematically. Our preliminary exploratory study was a case study that adopted the proposed architecture for RASA, a social robotic platform aimed at teaching Persian Sign Language (PSL) to hearing-impaired children. The last step is the evaluation. We observed that the architecture’s capabilities adequately matched RASA’s needs for its applications in teaching sign language.