For Homebound Students, a Robot Proxy in the Classroom

All without leaving her living room.

Born with a chronic heart disorder that weakened her immune system and made attending school risky, Lexie, 9, was tutored at her home in Sumter for years. But this spring, her family began experimenting with an alternative — a camera-and-Internet-enabled robot that swivels around the classroom and streams two-way video between her school and house.

“She immediately loved the robot,” her mother, Cristi Kinder, said, of the device, called a VGo, which Lexie controls from her home computer. Lexie dressed up the robot, which is about the height of her third-grade classmates, in pink ribbons and a tutu, and she renamed it Princess VGo.

A small but quickly growing number of chronically ill students — at least 50 across the country — now attend school virtually with what are called “remote presence robots.” The technology is still expensive (a VGo costs $6,000, in addition to $1,200 a year for maintenance and other costs) and imperfect (when the robot loses its Internet connection, it goes lifeless and must be pushed).

And despite the fantasies of Lexie’s classmates — “I want a robot so I can stay in bed all day,” one 8-year-old said — such robots are mostly last resorts for children restricted to their houses or hospital rooms.

As Web-based video becomes more prominent as a teaching tool, special education advocates say these robots are valuable alternatives to tutoring. About 23,000 students across the country are homebound or hospitalized each school year. They might not otherwise interact with classmates or could fall farther behind academically, advocates say.

“Soon, these robots should be the price of an inexpensive laptop,” said Maja Mataric, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California, who studies how robots help children with learning disabilities. “They should make access to education much easier for students who are convalescing.”

Dr. Mataric’s research focuses on using robots to teach social cues to children with autism. Children adapt far more quickly to the technology than adults and treat the machine like another classmate, she says. During a fire drill at one Texas school, students were so worried about the VGo that they insisted on escorting it out of the building to safety.

The VGo is four feet tall, weighs 18 pounds and is shaped like a white chess pawn, with a video screen on its face. Lexie controls its movement with her computer mouse. Video of the classroom at Alice Drive Elementary School appears on her computer screen, and video of her face appears on the robot’s display screen. The robot and Lexie’s computer support two-way voice communication, and Lexie can flash her VGo’s lights to get the teacher’s attention.

Since 2007, VGo, based in Nashua, N.H., has been selling the robots to company executives who want to keep an eye on employees while traveling and to doctors, who use it to “visit” patients at different hospitals. Two years ago, it realized schools might be a new market. The first classroom model was sold to a school in Knox City, Tex., to be used by a child with an immune deficiency.

The company’s big break came during this year’s Super Bowl. Verizon, which provides the LTE wireless connection for the robot, ran a commercial about a student using VGo. Before the ad, VGo had sold about 10 robots to schools. Since then, they have sold about 40.

Most robots are bought with state or local money marked for disabled students, but at some schools, parents have held fund-raising events or bought the robot themselves. In Huntsville, Tex., education officials bought five VGos last year and are planning for five more next year. They named the program Morgan’s Angels after a student with cancer who missed school for six months but was able to attend remotely with the robot’s help.

For students like Connor Flanagan, 14, of Tyngsborough, Mass., the main benefit has been social interaction. He does not go to school because of a rare lung condition, but he has stayed in touch with friends while awaiting a transplant.

“He walks down the hallway kind of like everybody else,” said his mother, Jennifer Flanagan. “The kids — aside the fact that it was a robot — they treated him like Connor. He’d roll through the room, and you’d hear ‘Hey, Connor. Hi, Connor.’ ”

Parents have raised privacy concerns about children using cameras in class. But Ned Semonite, the company’s vice president for marketing and product management, said it was no different from a smartphone or Web camera.

The greatest logistical challenge is maintaining an Internet connection. Lori Gearhart, of Colesburg, Iowa, said her grandson, Aidan Bailey, 9, was able to use the robot after his lung collapsed last year. His science class was studying insects, and Aidan kept a cocoon in his hospital room. He would show classmates videos of its transformation into a butterfly.

But other times, she said, the robot, which was bought through a community fund-raising effort for Aidan, could not receive enough of a wireless signal. “It ends up where the classmates have to carry the robot down the hall,” she said.

In Sumter, Shawn Hagerty, the director of special education programs for the school district, bought a robot after seeing Verizon’s commercial. The teachers set aside a day when students could meet and play with the robot.

Lexie’s robot has its own desk and charging station against a wall. Ivey Smith, her teacher, said the children had embraced the idea of having a robot in the class and screamed with excitement every time it turned on.

“I was concerned they would be distracted,” she said. “But within a couple days, they acted like it had always been here. They feel special that there’s a robot in their class.”

On a recent day, Ms. Smith’s class was learning about synonyms. She asked every student to think of a word with the same meaning as the word “glassy.” A moment later, the robot’s pink and green lights blinked, and the class shouted, “Lexie!”

“My word is ‘shiny,’ ” she said through the video screen.

“Yes, very good,” the teacher replied. “Good answer.”

Between classes, Lexie guides the robot down the hallway. At day’s end, she rolls it to a charging station. On the way out of class, one child, Hazel Grace Kolb, waved goodbye to the machine.

“See you tomorrow, robot,” she said.

A Robot With a Delicate Touch

The sensation that Baxter conveys is not creepy, but benign, perhaps even disarmingly friendly. And that is intentional.

Baxter, the first product of Rethink Robotics, an ambitious start-up company in a revived manufacturing district here, is a significant bet that robots in the future will work directly with humans in the workplace.

That is a marked shift from today’s machines, which are kept safely isolated from humans, either inside glass cages or behind laser-controlled “light curtains,” because they move with Terminator-like speed and accuracy and could flatten any human they encountered.

By contrast, Baxter, which comes encased in plastic and has a nine-foot “wingspan,” is relatively slow and imprecise in the way it moves. And it has an elaborate array of safety mechanisms and sensors to protect the human workers it assists.

Here in a brick factory that was once one of the first electrified manufacturing sites in New England, Rodney A. Brooks, the legendary roboticist who is Rethink’s founder, proves its safety by placing his head in the path of Baxter’s arm while it moves objects on an assembly line.

The arm senses his head and abruptly stops moving with a soft clunk. Dr. Brooks, unfazed, points out that the arm is what roboticists call “compliant”: intended to sense unexpected obstacles and adjust itself accordingly.

The $22,000 robot that Rethink will begin selling in October is the clearest evidence yet that robotics is more than a laboratory curiosity or a tool only for large companies with vast amounts of capital. The company is betting it can broaden the market for robots by selling an inexpensive machine that can collaborate with human workers, the way the computer industry took off in the 1980s when the prices of PCs fell sharply and people without programming experience could start using them right out of the box.

“It feels like a true Macintosh moment for the robot world,” said Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who oversaw the development of the iPod and the iPhone.

Baxter will come equipped with a library of simple tasks, or behaviors — for example, a “common sense” capability to recognize it must have an object in its hand before it can move and release it.

Although it will be possible to program Baxter, the Rethink designers avoid the term. Instead they talk about “training by demonstration.” For example, to pick up an object and move it, a human will instruct the robot by physically moving its arm and making it grab the object.

The robot’s redundant layers of safety mechanisms include a crown of sonar sensors ringing its head that automatically slows its movements whenever a human approaches. Its computer-screen face turns red to let workers know that it is aware of their presence.

And each robot has a large red “e-stop” button, causing immediate shutdown, even though Dr. Brooks says it is about as necessary as the Locomotive Acts, the 19th-century British laws requiring that early automobiles be preceded by a walker waving a red flag.

Soon, Dr. Brooks predicts, robots will be mingling with humans, routinely and safely. “With the current standards, we have to have it,” he said of the e-stop button. “But at some point we have to get over it.”

What kind of work will Baxter and its ilk perform? Rethink, which is manufacturing Baxter in New Hampshire, has secretly tested prototypes at a handful of small companies around the country where manufacturing and assembly involve repetitive tasks. It estimates that the robots can work for the equivalent of about $4 an hour.

“It fit in with our stable of equipment and augmented the robots we already have,” said Chris Budnick, president of Vanguard Plastics, a 30-person company in Southington, Conn., that makes custom-molded components.

Employees whose menial tasks are done by robots are not being laid off, he said, but assigned to jobs that require higher-level skills — including training the robots to work on manufacturing lines with short production runs where the tasks change frequently.

“Our folks loved it and they felt very comfortable with it,” Mr. Budnick said. “Even the older folks didn’t perceive it as a threat.”

Other efforts are under way to design robots that interact safely with human workers. Universal Robots, a Danish firm, has introduced a robot arm that does not need to be put in a glass cage — though the system requires a skilled programmer to operate.

And late last year Javier Movellan, director of the Machine Perception Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, where he took videos of workers in factories where jobs have been outsourced from the United States.