[Robotgroup] News: Giggling robot becomes one of the kids

[Vern Graner]

 From this link:

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn12879-giggling-robot-becomes-one-of-the-kids-.html

Tiny link:

http://tinyurl.com/2gj4jt

comes this story (note: there's a video at the link):

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Giggling robot becomes one of the kids
Movie Camera
05 November 2007

Children who spent several weeks with an interactive robot, eventually 
treated it more like each other than a simple toy.

Computers might not be clever enough to trick adults into thinking they 
are intelligent yet, but a new study shows that a giggling robot is 
sophisticated enough to get toddlers to treat it as a peer.

An experiment led by Javier Movellan at the University of California San 
Diego, US, is the first long-term study of interaction between toddlers 
and robots.

The researchers stationed a 2-foot-tall robot called QRIO (pronounced 
"curio"), and developed by Sony, in a classroom of a dozen toddlers aged 
between 18 months and two years.

QRIO stayed in the middle of the room using its sensors to avoid bumping 
the kids or the walls. It was initially programmed to giggle when the 
kids touched its head, to occasionally sit down, and to lie down when 
its batteries died. A human operator could also make the robot turn its 
gaze towards a child or wave as they went away. "We expected that after 
a few hours, the magic was going to fade," Movellan says. "That's what 
has been found with earlier robots." But, in fact, the kids warmed to 
the robot over several weeks, eventually interacting with QRIO in much 
the same way they did with other toddlers.

Taking care
The researchers measured the bond between the children and the robot in 
several ways. Firstly, as with other toddlers, they touched QRIO mostly 
on the arms and hands, rather than on the face or legs. For this age 
group, "the amount of touching is a good predictor of how you are doing 
as a social being", Movellan says.

The children also treated QRIO with more care and attention than a 
similar-looking but inanimate robot that the researchers called Robby, 
which acted as a control in the experiment. Once they had grown 
accustomed to QRIO, they hugged it much more than Robby, who also 
received far more rough treatment.

A panel, who watched videos of the interactions between the children and 
QRIO, concluded that these interactions increased in quality over 
several months.

Eventually, the children seemed to care about the robot's well being. 
They helped it up when it fell, and played "care-taking" games with it – 
most commonly, when QRIO's batteries ran out of juice and it lay down, a 
toddler would come up and cover it with a blanket and say "night, 
night". Altering QRIO's behaviour also changed the children's attitude 
towards the robot. When the researchers programmed QRIO to spend all its 
time dancing, the kids quickly lost interest. When the robot went back 
to its old self, the kids again treated it like a peer again.

Autistic helper
"The study shows that current technology is very close to being able to 
produce robots able to bond with toddlers, at least over long periods of 
time," says Movellan. But, he adds, it is not clear yet whether robots 
can appeal in the same way to older children or adults.

Movellan says that a robot like this might eventually be useful as a 
classroom assistant. "You can think of it as an appliance," he says. "We 
need to find the things that the robots are better at, and leave to 
humans the things humans are better at," Movellan says.

"This is a very interesting result," says Takayuki Kanda of the Advanced 
Telecommunications Research Institute in Japan.

One of the problems with past robots was that people quickly got bored 
of them, says Kanda. Since this study shows that QRIO held children's 
interest, Kanda says. "This study opens the possibility for classroom 
applications," or for helping autistic children.
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Vern

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