A Sociable Robotic Platform to Make Career Advices for Undergraduates

Most of the undergraduates couldn’t figure out a proper direction for their future careers since advising depends on the person and students show aversion in revealing their information to other humans. This research focused on creating a social robotic platform to interact with undergraduates in the field of computer science to realize possible career paths, as recent researches show social companion robots tend to form a stronger bond, which helps the addressee to share their information easily. The robot was created as a tabletop robot employing minimalistic design with a friendly view attached with speech synthesis for communicating purposes. Data was collected from 202 persons, who followed a degree in computer science. Data contains their experience, qualifications, and skills. Thereafter an artificial neural network was created using supervised learning to predict the career path with 95% performance accuracy. The experiment was performed by engaging 15 students from the final year who are a doing degree in computer science and they were asked to provide feedback on the interactions with the robot. The gathered responses highlighted robot animacy, interaction, technology and usefulness. Therefore, from the results it can be concluded that a majority of the students accepted the robot, interacted without hesitation and had friendly conversations with the robot where they valued the generated output from the robot.