“My student walks into the lab without a coat or goggles. What if, instead of a teaching assistant having to go around and check that everyone has their safety gear on, a [co-robot] system learns when the students have proper gear and provides feedback? Our student-built system can do that.
"Then we wanted to go beyond simple safety, beyond recognizing whether a piece of gear is present or absent, and ask, ‘Are students doing actions correctly?’ Now the co-robot is able to determine whether a student is using a piece of equipment correctly, for example a hammer — taking into account their posture, whether it is close to their face, and their form. We start building collective knowledge to build corrective feedback.”
— Conrad Tucker, assistant professor of engineering design, industrial engineering and computer science at Penn State, and director of the DATA Lab, studies how virtual-reality environments can support learning. He spoke at the Institute for Cyber Science ICS-ACI social March 22 in the HUB-Robeson Center at University Park.