To spare you the effort of googling, “pair programming is a software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the driver, writes code while the other, the observer or navigator, reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The two programmers switch roles frequently” (Wikipedia).

Pair programming is considered to be an excellent method for beginners, as it helps to develop both coding and collaborative teamwork skills. Recently a new trend, known as “distributed pair programming” has emerged where participants are not physically present in the same location. We investigated whether telepresence robots could be used to facilitate this type of collaboration.

In TalTech university pair programming is widely adopted by one of the members of our research group, associate professon Jaanus Pöial, who designed the experiment and used the robots during his classes of “Algorithms and Data Structures” course.

As a result of this research and based on the data collected by Jaanus, Janika Leoste took the stage at the Real Robots in Education conference. Although telepresence robots offer the convenience of not having to travel to conferences, unfortunately, none were available in Limassol, Cyprus.

To sum up our results, there are both good and bad news. The bad news:

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We could name the students of School nr. 21 not only like-minders, but colleagues - in this school students can study in 3 varieties of classes specialising either in Music, English, or Robotics and Entrepreneurship. Although we are yet to put to test elementary students’ entrepreneurship skills, as far as it concerns robotics their profound knowledge impressed us alot.

Children had a opportunity to use and compare all three models of telepresence robots that we have - Temi, Double 3 and Ohmni in a variety of different scenarios and afterwards we asked their opinion whether such devices could find their place in schools. It appeared that although almost have of the respondents would rather prefer a teacher to be physically present in the class, they mostly would not mind their classmates to use robots for telepresence.

We also noticed a very peculiar thing

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We have been conducting continuous tests to evaluate and compare our robots’ abilities, such as vision, interface convenience, network capabilities, and other features. While these tests are undoubtedly useful, they’re not particularly engaging. Therefore, as part of our “Enhancing Social Interaction in Education and Business by using Telepresence Robots” course, we decided to organize a triathlon to make the testing process more exciting.

During the running portion of the triathlon, Ohmni proved to be a clear-cut winner, reaching the far end of the room much more quickly than Double. Additionally, Ohmni exhibited greater bravery by leaping from the stairs without hesitation, while Double was more cautious and stopped in front of the first step.

Stay tuned for the announcement of the results of the third and final part of the competition, which will be published soon on our blog. Don’t miss out on this exciting update!

Joint meeting for all ReSTELA project participants took place in Tallinn this week.

A research group from Cyprus, led by Professor George Georgiou, presented their perspective on the project infrastructure, and Aleksei Talisainen from TalTech provided an overview of our vision for using telepresence robots in the project.

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As we all know (and heard many jokes about), different people have their own understanding of the distance to maintain during communication. Factors such as personality, culture, and, well, eyesight :-) play a role. So during one of our discussions we asked ourselves a question: how far would a person stand from a telepresence robot during the communication with a person controlling it? After all, it is a person you are talking to. Or a robot? To understand it better, our research group conducted an experiment during one of our workshops.

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