The project will develop a ST(R)EAM IT platform - robot-based telepresence system, which will provide students and teachers with live interactive access to any remote facility - cultural, industrial, educational, institutional, natural.
WP1 Project Management
The project management and implementation activities will focus on the management of the project scope, time, budget and quality. They will be performed by the Management Group (MG), supported by the Quality Assurance, Monitoring and Evaluation Group (QM&EG). The project scope management will control the work done in order to ensure that all relevant tasks are performed, and only the relevant tasks are performed. The scope management PM activity will be performed at the start of each WP, ensuring consensus between the partners on the scope of the work. The scope will be monitored once a month during the implementation of the project work. The project time management will control for timely completion of project tasks, it will identify schedule slips and delays and will suggest recovery strategies to catch up with the initial plan or provide an alternative plan keeping the task completion date.
WP2 – TELE ROBKO
The creation of an autonomous mobile robot (and the required software) for providing virtual presence visits of museums, as a part of the teaching curriculum or as an extracurricular activity for classes of students (pupils) and their teacher. This is a high-tech solution, which will allow the visiting class to easily remote visit (“tele – visit”) the museum exhibitions regardless of the distance separating them form the location of the museum (for example – in another city or even in other county).
Students will be able to view in real time the exposed national treasures, cultural values, historical artifacts, art and so on exhibits and participate interactively in the exhibition tour, conducted by the museum expert-guide (including asking questions and receiving answers trough the robot’s audio system). The detailed description of the content of the activities is provided as part of the budget justification in order to give evidence of the quantity and the quality of planned processes and expected products and results.
WP3 Human-Robot Interaction Interface
Human robot interaction interfaces are the most important tool for integrating robots in people’s lives. The goal of human robot Interaction interfaces is to bring robots closer to people and break the barrier between those two groups (people and robots). The role of these interfaces is to enable users, in our case students, to control robots, to give them orders in order to experience virtual walks through museums more closely and more realistically with high quality user experience.
1: One of the essential points in the design of a web based telerobotic system is the definition of the Human-Robot interaction.Since, the main goal of this project is developing of a teleoperated robotic system, the interaction itself will take place through a web-based interface. Carefully designed and developed human robot interaction interfaces will be fundamental for system operation, robot efficiency, and end-user satisfaction.
2: In order to enable and facilitate robot-assisted virtual tours, the system will provide intelligent tour planning and scheduling system, through a web-based user interface, which is a main point of interaction between users (human) and robot.
3: Content presentation interface will enable visitors to get the relevant information about exhibition, the same as they were present physically in the museum. The visitors will be able to see a wide image of the exhibition, to see each EPs closely, to listen the museum tour guide’s lecture, receive audio-visual additions to the lecture and interactively communicate with the museum tour guide.
4: The web-based user interface, together with the navigation control module, will allow users to choose between various visiting modes for robot museum visiting tours. If the visitors choose “tele-visit” guided tour, they will get a tour in which the museum expert, assisted by a robot, will conduct a tour.
WP4 Methodology and Teachers’ Toolkit
Teachers’ toolkit will provide user guide and video-how-to use and control the tele-robot for providing virtual presence visits of museums, as a part of the teaching curriculum. The output for this intellectual product aims at straightening skills and abilities to be learned by the teachers. It aims at defining specific case studies for educational in history with specific teaching material, focusing on moderns learning and teaching methods. It focuses on developing specific educational content. It will ease knowledge transfer between teacher and student at different levels, such as telepresence, or virtual presence. In particular, we will develop and use specific content for using the advances in areas related to information and communication technologies as well as the innovative technologies in robotics, which allows the development of advanced tools which can be used to improve the experience of online visiting of the museum expositions, thus can make possible for students to experience the museum and art from their own school classes without actually having to leave the class. The main output will be a set of training materials delivered as teacher toolkit containing tutorials, videos and guidelines to be delivered in electronic format. A complete e-learning solution consisting of curriculum-based historical content. It will support the development of innovative teaching materials for e-learning in history.
WP5 Digital Content
This innovative method of content dissemination of the museum collections and preserved data could help cultural heritage of the involved countries depart from the local borders and become known to the rest of the world through an engaging interactive experience that involves both the sense of collocation and actual content access. Such presentation of the museum collections could contribute to increased interest from organizations of specialized exhibitions by heritage institutions, organization of international workshops, exchange of best practices, storytelling activities and many more.
WP6 Dissemination
Dissemination will promote ST(R)EAM IT project results by building additional awareness of the importance of digital transformation and demonstrating a robot-based innovative tool for developing digital readiness, resilience and capacity piloted but not limited to VET and secondary level educational institutions. The activities will present STEM by example and will provide the teacher/trainer community in the partner countries with new innovative digital content, technologies and practices, show-casing their features and educational potential to motivate students to learn more for the cultural heritage in the region and in Europe. All events will promote inclusion and diversity in all related fields of education and culture.