The four paws of robotics: designing a zoomorphic robot for animal welfare education

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigates the design of a zoomorphic robot for animal welfare education with children. Animal welfare education can cultivate positive attitudes and behaviours towards animals, thereby promoting positive, safe child-animal interactions and enabling children to experience the many benefits of human-animal relationships. Zoomorphic robots (robots that are animal-like in appearance and behaviour) are promising tools for animal welfare education because children engage with them somewhat like live animals and their interactivity could make interventions more engaging and effective. Since animal welfare education is a novel application domain, the thesis encompasses work to investigate children's perceptions of zoomorphic robots and how to design a zoomorphic robot that is suitable for animal welfare education. First, we aimed to better understand children's attitudes towards and beliefs about a zoomorphic robot, focusing on how small behaviours that implied the robot could feel emotions, like tail wagging, affected their opinions. The findings indicate that these subtle behaviours can influence children's beliefs about a zoomorphic robot. Subsequently, we invited end-users, namely animal welfare educators and schoolchildren, to co-design concepts for a zoomorphic robot for animal welfare education. We aimed to understand what children perceived as important features of pets and what animal welfare educators needed to teach children about safe, appropriate behaviour around pets. From this work, we identify several points of convergence and divergence in design requirements between the two groups, present guidelines for the design of educational pet robots that are applicable beyond animal welfare education, and challenge the widespread emphasis on cuteness in zoomorphic robots. Finally, we created a new design for a zoomorphic robot, implemented it by customising an existing platform, and developed an educational intervention focusing on dogs' emotions and welfare needs and responsible dog ownership. Evaluation in schools showed that the intervention improved children's knowledge and beliefs about dogs. While the zoomorphic robot did not significantly outperform a stuffed toy in terms of learning outcomes, children's experience of the intervention was better, highlighting the potential for robots to enrich animal welfare education in the future. This thesis contributes new insights into children's interactions with zoomorphic robots, design ideas for zoomorphic robots and educational robots, methodologies for eliciting these ideas from children and educators, and a prototyped and evaluated system that can support animal welfare education