Higher Education Students’ Training Toward Inclusion; Virtual Reality Introduces Socially Assistive Robots Technologies for Digital Inclusion

Abstract

Inclusion is a system that embraces difference as the norm. It is possible to accomplish successful inclusion in situations that support and encourage social contact, such as the interventions using Socially Assistive Robots (SAR).

The proven, through research, the ability of SAR to promote interventions for the inclusion of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), leads to the need for specialized education of university students in pedagogical or special education departments, to get acquainted with robots and their utilization methods for the inclusion of children.

However, getting acquainted with SAR is not always easy as the variety of proposed robots is significant. In addition, it is pretty demanding work to design and develop software for the wide variety of SARs’ educational applications and organize hands-on training. For this reason, in an Erasmus+ program, virtual reality (VR) technology was proposed and utilized to present robots and introduce analytical methods for their implementation on how to use SAR through detailed scenarios, such as the detailed description of the outlined ARRoW (Assisting Relations Robotic Workfellow) method.

This chapter will initially present the ASD aspects, inclusive techniques, and why SAR is a powerful tool to deliver inclusive interventions to the ASD population, subsequently will analyze the design and implementation of a VR training scenario that utilizes the ARRoW method and the SAR Daisy toward inclusion. Then we discuss the implementation aspects of the training activities and Higher Education (HE) students’ participation.