How children use tools: Fix-a-Robot
Thank you for visiting the project website! You may have browsed here, or you may have taken part in our Fix-a-Robot experiment and want to know more about the results and our work.
First of all, thank you to everyone who took part! These experiments rely on people being willing to help us out so we could not have done it without you. We are still collating the data from the preliminary study, but we will publish that here as soon as we can. In the meantime, you can find out more about our other work by exploring the website.
Our experiment involves a whack-a-mole style task where you are asked to fix a robot by tapping the parts on it that light up with various tools. How you use the different tools tells us a about how you learn to use tools. A key aim of our work is to better understand the fundamental processes that govern natural, intuitive control of the hand. This includes the control of external devices, such as those used in our Fix-a-Robot study and others, such as prosthetic limbs.
Hopefully, by understanding natural movements and movements with tools, we will be able to discover what makes certain tools more intuitive to use and how we can translate that to other devices. In the future we hope our work can be used to inform the design of remote handing devices used in industry, minimally invasive surgical tools, and prosthetic limbs. .
This work is in collaboration with AMBIONICS and Ken Valyear (Bangor Psychology) .
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