Personalized Instruction of Physical Skills with a Social Robot

While robots have been used extensively for the purpose of teaching symbolic knowledge, using robots to teach or refine motor skills of humans, such as swinging a bat, or shooting a basketball, is underserved. Robots are uniquely well situated to observe physical movements, identify problems, prioritize which problems to address first, and to patiently communicate personalized advice to the student. We propose an architecture to coach physical skills, and focus on the second and third of these challenges - identifying problems with the movements, and prioritizing which to address first - as applied to the domain of shooting a basketball. We present a supervised learning approach to prioritize which problems to work on, and propose the design of several user studies that will determine the effectiveness of the algorithm.