The Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) is one of the largest academic units at Michigan State University. The department is home to 20 laboratories equipped with cutting-edge technologies that enable research in a wide spectrum of topics. The department leverages its impressive research capabilities in collaboration with other departments in areas of robotics, mechatronics, special education, psychology and more.

The CSE department hosts many research professionals from various fields who are collaborating to develop an innovative system for workplace training. Job coaching is a powerful tool for supporting the employment of individuals with disabilities, especially cognitive and behavioral disabilities. Existing methods of job coaching face several issues. On-site job coaching faces limitations because a coach must be physically present.

Our Robotic Job Coaching system solves many problems with modern job coaching techniques. Job coaches can now oversee many clients simultaneously and remotely. Coaches connect in a teleconference call with any one of their clients instantly using a queue system. Importantly, job coaches control a robotic arm to empower better teaching. The arm holds an iPad, which is running our application, and thus the coach can change their view of the work area at will.

Our system extends the influence of job coaches beyond in-person training to efficient remote conferencing. Unlike traditional conference software, our solution gives coaches the ability to manipulate their point of view, increasing effectiveness of coaching.

The front end of our application uses the SwiftUI framework. The back-end server uses the Flask web framework. The application communicates to the back-end server over the WebSocket protocol. The server initiates a peer-to-peer connection over WebRTC between the client and coach users.