Pietro Piccini

Personal Remarks

Week 1

 
I participated in two meetings (Sunday, Tuesday) where we discussed how we want to proceed with our project. More specifically we discussed the type of robot we would like to use and the personas that we would aim to help with our robot

Week 2

 
In the second week, we split into two groups: the first group worked on writing the project wiki and the second group worked on the code.
I volunteered to start working on the code. For this week I started familiarizing myself with the choregraphe suite and the documentation.

Week 3

 
In week 3 I started implementing some functionalities for the robot such as the medicine reminder. In the end, this implementation was not used.

Week 4

 
In week 4 I helped with testing the current code on Pepper.

Week 5

 
From this week I stopped working on the code because we realized that it wasn't efficient to have 3 people work on the code and 3 people work on everything else and so I started planning the evaluation of the experiment and some activities that we could try for the experiment. In the end, we chose to test only gardening which was not an activity planned by me.

Week 6

I dedicated week 6 to making the questionnaire for the evaluation. At first, I wanted to use the SASSI questionnaire to evaluate the interaction with Pepper and the PANAS questionnaire to evaluate mood but we decided that it would be better to change some of the questions to fit our evaluation.

Week 7

 
During week 7 we evaluated the experiments. The first thing I had to do was to transfer the questionnaire to the Qualtrics platform as I only received access the morning of the first experiment. Then, I started collecting data from the experiment, performed an initial analysis, prepared the part of the presentation related to the results of the experiments, and help with the wiki by making the problem scenario storyboard.

Week 8

 
In week 8 I finalized the result by improving the graphs, adding confidence interval values, performing statistical tests on our data and in the end putting the final results on the wiki.

Personal Reflections

In the end, I am very glad that I picked this course because I learned many things about the development of social agents that I was not aware of prior to this course and I now feel that I am more prepared in case I need to develop such agents or in case I need to design and execute experiments involving human-agent interactions. I particularly enjoyed the fact that I had the opportunity to work with a real robot and that the course was designed to push us to think as if we were working with real patients.
Regarding the work that I have done, I think I did more in the last 4 weeks of the project than in the first 4 weeks and I think that's because I initially thought I would help with the code but later realized that there was not a need for more poeple to work on the code so I had to switch to working on the wiki, evaluation and result analysis.