Generative AI for Social Robots in Education

The limited autonomy of social robots currently prevents many ambitions in educational robotics from being realised. This leads to scripted dialogues, content that fails to adapt to individual students and conversations remaining largely text-based. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) might alleviate these issues, allowing for educational robots whose dialog can be flexibly generated based on the lessons to be taught, the student’s needs and personality, and the environment. This chapter presents a vision of how generative AI can power truly autonomous and adaptive social robots in education, discussing limitations of past educational robotics research, recent technical advances in AI, as well as concrete examples of applications of AI in educational human-robot interaction, and a reflection on limitations of current AI. By bridging technical and pedagogical perspectives, it shows what the next step in the evolution of human-robot interaction in educational contexts might look like.

If you want to know more about this research, read our paper! The final version of this paper was published as a chapter in the book “Social Robots in Education: How to Effectively Introduce Social Robots into Classrooms”, part of the Springer Studies in Computational Intelligence.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any other questions or want to know more! You can use any of the channels at the bottom of this page, or send an email to ruben[dot]janssens[at]ugent[dot]be.

If you use our work in any future research, please use the following citation:

@incollection{verhelst2025enabling,
  title={Enabling Autonomous and Adaptive Social Robots in Education: A Vision for the Application of Generative AI},
  author={Verhelst, Eva and Janssens, Ruben and Belpaeme, Tony},
  booktitle={Social Robots in Education: How to Effectively Introduce Social Robots into Classrooms},
  pages={17--42},
  year={2025},
  publisher={Springer}
}