Nur Binti Muhamad Zabidi Undergraduate Dissertation 2015/16

Telepresence Robots and Teaching.

Supervised by A.Sharkey

Abstract

Living in a world where advancement in not an impossible action to achieve even in every second, has turned education to into a very important need for every human. Therefore, there is high demand in education, which resulted in many researches being carried out to fulfill this demand. Nowadays, a number of different types of robots has been developed and used to teach students in classes. This include telepresence  robots as well, where their presences can be seen throughout the globe.

Following this trend in education. this project aims to investigate the effects of teaching communicated through a telepresence  robot ( Mantarobot ) in terms of information transfer, communication quality, sense of presence and communication experience. Does the telepresence robot provide a more effective teaching and a better experience, physically and emotionally is the big question to be answer in this project. This project is designed to be an experimental project with two different conditions to test whether the hypothesis is to be accepted or rejected. Questionnaires are used to measure the experimental results. After the implementation, it can be concluded that the telepresence  robot quantitatively increases the effect of communication in terms of information transfer. For the qualitative results, all of the p-values shows that the results are statistically insignificant. Hence, the hypothesis for the effects of communication in terms of communication quality, sense of presence and communication experience could not be proved. The study accomplished to present that there is no clear evidence that shows the significant difference in the two experiment conditions.