Reading with Robots: A Personalized Robot-Based Learning Companion for Solving Cognitively Demanding Tasks

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Soon, sociable companion robots will become indispensable for providing related support in our daily living and tasks. This paper provides process, design perspectives, and deployment of a reading companion robot (IQRA’) that monitors the cognitive load level of a reader during demanding reading tasks and to provide support for readers to complete tasks. Current technological solutions only cover external design aspects of the application and have no adaptive mechanisms to deal with dynamics with the reader’s perspectives and environment. Inspired by several theories from cognitive psychology domains, a computational model of the cognitive load was developed as a basis for reasoning and analytical purposes. This analytical ability provides the robot with a computational mechanism to reason in human-like manners and analyses of the functioning of observed conditions. This is essential in providing better-informed actions and intelligent analysis. Besides, the physical and software design of the robot and essential concepts in human-robot interaction are covered. Also, five evaluation constructs were chosen to evaluate the capability of our robot-based platform. These constructs are; 1) likeability, 2) perceived intelligence, 3) sociability, 4) social presence, and 5) cognitive load. The overall results from the pilot study support the practical usage of our proposed robotic solution.