When rats rescue robots

Robots are increasingly being used to monitor and even participate in social interactions with animals in their own environments. Robotic animals enable social behaviors to be observed in natural environments, or specifically elicited under the control of an experimenter. It is an open question to what extent animals will form positive social connections with such robots. To test this, we familiarized rats to two rat-sized robots, one exhibiting “social” behaviors, including helping, while the other was also mobile but not helpful. When given an opportunity to release the robots from restrainers, as they do for conspecifics, we found that rats did release the robots, and moreover, were significantly more likely to release the helpful than the unhelpful robot. These findings indicate that robots can elicit helpful behavior from rats, and that rats will even discriminate between robots on the basis of their behaviors

Lingodroids: investigating grounded color relations using a social robot for children

Language can be a useful tool for social robots as part of their repertoire of social engagement. This late breaking report outlines preliminary studies into how a child can teach a robot lexicons for colors and color relations. The robot used is a minimal social robot, made from cardboard and foam, that interacts with the children through a simple color naming game. Distributed, non-parametric lexicons similar to those used in previous language learning robot studies are used to store links between words and colors. We visually present the resulting lexicons and highlight the issues that have arisen from this preliminary study and how they can be resolved for future studies. The results of this study indicate that children can teach a social robot lexicons, allowing the children and robot to develop a shared set of symbols for color

Designing for robust movement in a child-friendly robot

Motion is a critical aspect of communication, required to create natural interactions between humans and robots. Robots for the classroom pose several constraints on motion, which make them challenging to design, including maintaining the safety of the child and the robot, responding in a timely fashion, and creating motions that are expressive and not scary. In this paper we present the mechanical design of a social robot and demonstrate that it is capable of safe motion within the proximity of children through analysis and empirical testing of the arms. The robot has a novel mechanical design for its two arms, which include torso-mounted, back-drivable, torque-limited stepper motors. The results suggest that our design succeeds at increasing safety levels while enabling the use of socially acceptable speeds of motion during the interaction. This study implies that the design of robotic agents for social interaction with children should consider the design of mechanical features that enable safe contact between the human and the robot while not limiting the robot to slow motions that would impair the timing of the interaction

Spatiotemporal aspects of engagement during dialogic storytelling child-robot interaction

The success of robotic agents in close proximity of humans depends on their capacity to engage in social interactions and maintain these interactions over periods of time that are suitable for learning. A critical requirement is the ability to modify the behavior of the robot contingently to the attentional and social cues signaled by the human. A benchmark challenge for an engaging social robot is that of storytelling. In this paper, we present an exploratory study to investigate dialogic storytelling—storytelling with contingent responses—using a child-friendly robot. The aim of the study was to develop an engaging storytelling robot and to develop metrics for evaluating engagement. Ten children listened to an illustrated story told by a social robot during a science fair. The responses of the robot were adapted during the interaction based on the children’s engagement and touches of the pictures displayed by the robot on a tablet embedded in its torso. During the interaction the robot responded contingently to the child, but only when the robot invited the child to interact. We describe the robot architecture used to implement dialogic storytelling and evaluate the quality of human–robot interaction based on temporal (patterns of touch, touch duration) and spatial (motions in the space surrounding the robot) metrics. We introduce a novel visualization that emphasizes the temporal dynamics of the interaction and analyze the motions of the children in the space surrounding the robot. The study demonstrates that the interaction through invited contingent responses succeeded in engaging children, although the robot missed some opportunities for contingent interaction and the children had to adapt to the task. We conclude that (i) the consideration of both temporal and spatial attributes is fundamental for establishing metrics to estimate levels of engagement in real-time, (ii) metrics for engagement are sensitive to both the group and individual, and (iii) a robot’s sequential mode of interaction can facilitate engagement, despite some social events being ignored by the robot

Hand in hand: tools and techniques for understanding children's touch with a social robot

Robots that facilitate touch by children have special requirements in terms of safety and robustness, but little is known about how and when children actually use touch with robots. Tools and techniques are required to sense the variety of children's touch and to interpret the volumes of data generated. This explorative user study investigated children's patterns of touch during game play with a robot. We examined where the children touch the robot and their patterns of touch over time, using a raster-based visualisation of each child's time series of touches, recording patterns of touch across different games and children. We found that children readily engage with the robot, in particular spontaneously touching the robot's hands more than any other area. This user study and the tools developed may aid future designs of robots to autonomously detect when they have been touched

PiRat: an autonomous framework for studying social behaviour in rats and robots

The use of robots, as a social stimulus, provides several advantages over using another animal. In particular, for rat-robot studies, robots can produce social behaviour that is reproducible across trials. In the current work, we outline a framework for rat-robot interaction studies, that consists of a novel rat-sized robot (PiRat), models of robotic behavior, and a position tracking system for both robot and rat. We present the design of the framework, including constraints on autonomy, latency, and control. We pilot tested our framework by individually running the robot rat with eight different rats, first through a habituation stage, and then with PiRat performing two different types of behaviour - avoiding and frequently approaching. We evaluate the performance of the framework on latency and autonomy, and on the ability to influence the behaviour of individual rats. We find that the framework performs well on its constraints, engages some of the rats (according to the number of meetings), and features a control scheme that produces reproducible behaviour in rats. These features represent a first demonstration of a closed-loop rat-robot framework