Preschooler's companion

A cute, furry robot named Tega could help children become more engaged in educational activities by interacting with them one-on-one.

Developed by the Personal Robots Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tega is a socially assistive robot that interprets the emotional content of a student’s facial expressions and, based on those cues, creates a motivational learning strategy customized for each student.

In a pilot study in Boston last year, the MIT researchers had 38 preschool students work individually with Tega in 15-minute sessions over an eight-week period. As the kids learned Spanish vocabulary from a tablet-based learning game, Tega functioned not as a teacher but a fellow learner, encouraging the children and providing hints if needed.

The researchers divided the students into two groups. In the first, Tega simply mirrored the child’s emotional response. In the second group, the robot learned to create personalized responses to each child. For example, Tega might respond to a yawn or a sad face—both suggesting lowered engagement—by trying to encourage the student. The experiment’s results showed that students who’d experienced more personalized interaction with Tega were more engaged in the learning activity.

Rather than replacing face-to-face interaction with teachers, the robot could be used to enhance individual activity times. The MIT scientists say Tega’s introduction into a real classroom caused little disruption, with teachers and kids both embracing the technology—literally, in the kids’ case.

“It was amazing to see,” reported Goren Gordon, an artificial intelligence researcher from Israel and a member of the MIT team. “After a while the students started hugging it, touching it, making the expression it was making, and playing independently with almost no intervention or encouragement.”

Reinventing the wheel

In the future, your self-driving car will not only find its own parallel parking space, it will park by rolling into the space sideways, without even turning its wheels. How’s that, you ask? Because the tire of tomorrow’s autonomous car won’t be a wheel—it will be a ball.

At least, that’s the vision of engineers in Goodyear’s R&D department, which recently showcased the Eagle-360, a concept for a spherical tire designed for the 85 million autonomous vehicles some predict will be sold annually worldwide by 2035. The spherical tires are designed to move independently in any direction, which would improve maneuverability but require the smarts of a self-driving car to operate.

“When four wheels go in basically the same direction, a person can control them with a steering wheel,” noted Popular Mechanics writer Andrew Moseman. “When they can go in any direction, you need a computer to manage that.”

A car with spherical tires could recover from a skid by rotating the tires in four different directions simultaneously. The Goodyear engineers designed the tread of the Eagle-360 to mimic the pattern of brain coral, using multidirectional blocks and grooves. The design should improve traction and reduce hydroplaning by acting like a natural sponge—absorbing water on the road and then ejecting it through centrifugal force.

Unlike current vehicle drivetrains that use axles or independent suspensions to physically connect the car and the tires, Goodyear’s spherical tires would not even touch the car. They’d be suspended by magnetic levitation, which would also function as the car’s suspension, steering gear, and propulsion. —M.C.