Active Participation in Lectures via a Collaboratively Controlled Robot

Information technology, including digital devices, robots, and the internet, is of great interest in the field of education. Many previous studies have focused on improving lecturer–student communication during lectures. In this paper, we describe a new robot-teleoperation system for transferring students’ opinions or questions to the lecturer. Through this system, users can collaboratively choose a message to be uttered by a robot. We report the results of a subjective experiment performed in a controlled lecture-style environment. The results show that participation, as estimated from behavioral and subjective measures, increased in lectures using the proposed system compared with those that did not use the proposed system or employed a reduced version of the proposed system in which the robot was controlled individually (i.e., non-collaboratively).