Website of the Freeplay sandbox dataset (PInSoRo)
You might want to first familiarize yourself with the paradigm by reading the reference article The PInSoRo dataset: Supporting the data-driven study of child-child and child-robot social dynamics.
To use the Free-play Sandbox paradigm yourself, run your own studies, and acquire new data, you need a sandtray (essentially, a large touchscreen – in our experiments, we use a 27” one – used as an interactive table), and the following pieces of open-source software:
The user interface (written in Qt QML);
The core acquisition and robot control pipeline, written in C++ and Python, and using extensively ROS;
The supervisor for the experimenter to control the whole system and conveniently record participants (Python + HTML).
(1) is meant to run directly on the sandtray computer; (2) can run on the sandtray computer or on another external computer; (3) has a ‘server’ component that must run on the same computer as (2) and a experimenter interface that runs in a browser (a tablet is especially convenient for this purpose).
Note that all the provided code has been developped and tested on Linux (Ubuntu 16.04). Since we rely on ROS, we can not support Windows or macOS.
Visit each of the projects listed above (in that order) for installation notes.
The reference coding scheme, as well as our custom tool to annotate recordings, is explained here.
See dataset analysis for an overview of the tools and code snippets we provide.