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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The experiment tool place durig PYNT community annual meeting on December 15 at TalTech. It was prefaced with a seminar where certain topics regarding human-robot interaction were covered by the team members and our partners.

Janika Leoste opened the seminar with a keynote based on her report “Are telepresence robots here to stay” that was followed by a presentation on a topic “Take the power of storytelling and gamification” by John Heijligers and “Lecturing versus active learning” that continued with a discussion about the reasons students or lecturers sometimes resist active learning and are there any ways to support them in embracing new methodic.

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On December 14th and 15th, 2022, our cooperation partners from the Universities of Jyväskylä and Eindhoven visited IT College, where they met the members of our research group: Janika Leoste, Kalle Tammemäe, Jaanus Pöial, Tariq Meeran, and Kristel Marmor. We gave an overview of the experiments and research we conducted with remote-controlled robots in 2022. Our colleagues Johanna Pöysä-Tarhonen, Päivi Häkkinen, Kristof Fenyvesi, and Takumi Yada from Jyväskylä University introduced innovative methods of education research. Martijn Klabbers and John Heijligers from Eindhoven University discussed why to use challenge-based learning method in education - not for faster or better learning, but to be able to search, explore, and add new knowledge and solve real-world problems. John Heijligers shared his thoughts on how to make educational videos - through storytelling. We exchanged ideas on what scientific topics are of mutual interest to us and agreed on joint scientific projects to pursue in 2023.