on 09-11-2007 10:52

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The key step for robots to help teachers is for the automatons to be accepted by toddlers as social peers who are worth paying attention to - and bonding with - a hurdle that is crossed today in a study published by a team from the University of California, San Diego, UCSD.

The problem is that most robots do not hold a toddler's attention. The most successful so far have been storytellers, but even these can only hold interest for approximately 10 hours.

Now Dr Fumihide Tanaka of UCSD and colleagues has done much better by introducing a prototype "social robot" into a classroom of toddlers for five months.

A human controller sent very occasional instructions for the robot to turn its head or perform an action like giggling or dancing. The robot was programmed to lie down when its batteries were running out. Often children would put a blanket on him, saying "night-night". Early in the study, some children even cried when he keeled over.

The researchers videotaped the sessions and scored the quality of the interactions, noting that the children's social contact with the robot increased over time.

The children lost interest when the robot was reprogrammed to dance randomly, but the robot again became popular after resuming its original operating mode. "By the last sessions, five months later, they treated the robot as a peer rather than as a toy," the team reports.

The most important aspect of social interaction was touch: toddlers initially touched the robot on its face, but later only on its hands and arms, as they did with their human peers. The researchers are now developing autonomous robots for the classroom.

"We are interested in making personal robots that assist teachers in educational settings and enrich the classroom environment," said Dr Tanaka, adding that the team at UCSD is now developing a robot "specifically for educational purposes" based on these findings. But the team stressed that the robots are for use in classrooms and not to aid lazy parents.

For the study, the team used a Sony state-of-the-art humanoid robot, named QRIO, which is 23-inches tall. To compare with this prototype, which is a platform for robotics researchers, the team also used a similar inanimate robot, called Robby, and a teddy bear.

"The colourful teddy bear had elicited many hugs in previous observations with children this age. Surprisingly, it was ignored throughout the study. When children touched QRIO, they did so in a very careful manner. Robby, on the other hand, was treated like an inanimate object."

The team concludes that after 45 days of immersion in a childcare centre throughout a period of five months, "long-term bonding and socialisation occurred between toddlers and a state-of-the-art social robot. Rather than losing interest, the interaction between children and the robot improved over time."

Our results suggest that current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialisation with human toddlers for significant periods of time."

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Last update: 09-11-2007 10:53

Published in : Bot News, Educational

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