Virtual Reality Social Robot Platform: A Case Study on Arash Social Robot.

The role of technology in education and clinical therapy cannot be disregarded. Employing robots and computer-based devices as competent and advanced learning tools for children indicates that there is a role for technology in overcoming certain weaknesses of common therapy and educational procedures. In this paper, we present a new platform for a virtual reality social robot (VR-social robot) which could be used as an auxiliary device or a replacement for real social robots. To support the idea, a VR-robot, based on the real social robot Arash, is designed and developed in the virtual reality environment. "Arash" is a social robot buddy particularly designed and realized to improve learning, educating, entertaining, and clinical therapy for children with chronic disease. The acceptance and eligibility of the actual robot among these children have been previously investigated. In the present study, we investigated the acceptability and eligibility of a virtual model of the Arash robot among twenty children. To have a fair comparison a similar experiment was also performed utilizing the real Arash robot. The experiments were conducted in the form of storytelling. The initial results are promising and suggest that the acceptance of a VR-robot is fairly compatible to the real robot since the performance of the VR-robot did not have significant differences with the performance of the real Arash robot. Thereby, this platform has the potential to be a substitute or an auxiliary solution for the real social robot.