Teaching physical skills to humans requires one-on-one interaction between the teacher and the learner. With a shortage of human teachers, such a teaching mode faces the challenge of scaling up. Robots, with their replicable nature and physical capabilities, offer a solution. In this work, we present TeachingBot, a robotic system designed for teaching handwriting to human learners. We tackle two primary challenges in this teaching task: the adaptation to each learner's unique style and the creation of an engaging learning experience. TeachingBot captures the learner's style using a probabilistic learning approach based on the learner's handwriting. Then, based on the learned style, it provides physical guidance to human learners with variable impedance to make the learning experience engaging. Results from human-subject experiments based on 15 human subjects support the effectiveness of TeachingBot, demonstrating improved human learning outcomes compared to baseline methods. Additionally, we illustrate how TeachingBot customizes its teaching approach for individual learners, leading to enhanced overall engagement and effectiveness.

翻译：教授人类物理技能需要教师与学习者之间的一对一互动。在人类教师短缺的情况下，这种教学模式面临规模化的挑战。机器人凭借其可复制性和物理能力，为这一问题提供了解决方案。本文提出TeachingBot——一个用于向人类学习者教授手写的机器人系统。我们解决了该教学任务中的两大核心挑战：适应每位学习者的独特风格，以及创造引人入胜的学习体验。TeachingBot基于学习者的手写内容，采用概率学习方法捕捉其风格特征。随后，根据习得的风格，它通过可变阻抗为人类学习者提供物理引导，以增强学习过程的参与度。基于15名受试者的人体实验结果表明，TeachingBot的有效性得到验证，相比于基线方法，其显著提升了人类学习效果。此外，我们展示了TeachingBot如何针对个体学习者定制教学策略，从而提升整体参与度与教学效能。