There has been a sharp rise in the loneliness and social isolation felt amongst young people, resulting in an increased risk of developing many harmful conditions. Quarantining and remote working due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic have made the situation worse. Therefore, this thesis aims to develop a companion robot that provides social support and reduces the social isolation and loneliness felt by students in their dorm rooms. A Wizard-Of-Oz style study is used to capture the ideal behaviour of the robot. By allowing the human to take full control of the robot and deploying it with a user, the actions and behaviour the human chooses for the robot can be recorded and later used to create autonomous behaviour for the robot. The autonomous behaviour is controlled by two machine learning classification models. Information collected from the environment and the interactions with the user are combined to create a statespace. Given an input statespace, the first model determines if an action should be performed, and the second model determines which action this should be. The results show that the companion robot successfully reduced the amount of social isolation and loneliness felt by the students it was deployed with. The robot exhibited both socially engaging and autonomous behaviour, and the behaviour was personalised to each individual user. ; Ensamhet och social isolation är på uppgång, särskilt bland unga, vilket kan resultera i till exempel mental ohälsa och dylik problematik. Denna utveckling har endast förvärrats av karantän och distansarbete, som tvingats fram av den pandemiska situation som följt COVID-19. Målet med detta arbete är därför att utveckla en sällskapsrobot som kan underlätta denna ensamhet och sociala isolering. Genom Wizard of Oz-experiment fångas robotens ideala beteende. En människa ges full kontroll över roboten i interaktion med en användare, och det beteende som denna människa väljer för roboten registreras och används för att konstruera en autonom robot. Denna autonoma konstruktion ...


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    Title :

    Developing Peer-Trained Autonomous Companion Robots to Tackle Isolation ; Utveckling av peerutbildad autonom sällskapsrobot mot social isolering


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2021-01-01


    Type of media :

    Theses


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    629





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