Validating a skill transfer system based on reactive robots technology

Abstract

Up to now, the skill transfer capabilities of haptics have not only been at an initial stage of development, but also their evolution has been under-investigated in terms of users' impact and achievable results. The present paper is concerned with the concept of reactive robots (RR) system. A RR is a bi-directional system capable of understanding the meaning of motions and transferring skills among users and interfaces according to the interpreted motions. In this paper, the reactive robot control was used for replicating Japanese characters and the recognition system was used for evaluating the stochastic user's performance based on the hidden Markov model. This system may help to understand better the learning processes. Using such a kind of system, an application for learning Japanese handwriting has been developed and tested. We evaluated the skill transfer capabilities when the haptic feedback is used to improve the learning process based on some of the RR system features. Findings from this study indicate that the user's performance is enhanced considerably when both visual and haptic information are provided.