Teleoperation or Wizard-of-Oz control of social robots is commonly used in human-robot interaction (HRI) research. This is especially true for child-robot interactions, where technologies like speech recognition (which can help create autonomous interactions for adults) work less well. We propose to study young children's understanding teleoperation, how they conceptualize social robots in a learning context, and how this affects their interactions. Children will be told about the teleoperator's presence either before or after an interaction with a social robot. We will assess children's behavior, learning, and emotions before, during, and after the interaction. Our goal is to learn whether children's knowledge about the teleoperator matters (e.g., for their trust and for learning outcomes), and if so, how and when it matters most (e.g. at what age)

Breazeal, Cynthia L.

Kory Westlund, Jacqueline Marie

Breazeal, Cynthia Lynn

DSpace@MIT

Transparency, Teleoperation, and Children’s Understanding ofSocial RobotsJacqueline M. Kory Westlund & Cynthia BreazealPersonal Robots Group, MIT Media Lab20 Ames St., E15–468Cambridge, MA 02139Email: {jakory,cynthiab}@media.mit.eduAbstract—Teleoperation or Wizard-of-Oz control of social robots iscommonly used in human-robot interaction (HRI) research. This isespecially true for child-robot interactions, where technologies like speechrecognition (which can help create autonomous interactions for adults)work less well. We propose to study young children’s understandingteleoperation, how they conceptualize social robots in a learning context,and how this affects their interactions. Children will be told about theteleoperator’s presence either before or after an interaction with a socialrobot. We will assess children’s behavior, learning, and emotions before,during, and after the interaction. Our goal is to learn whether children’sknowledge about the teleoperator matters (e.g., for their trust and forlearning outcomes), and if so, how and when it matters most (e.g. at whatage).Index Terms—Child-robot interaction, deception, transparency, teleop-eration, social roboticsI. INTRODUCTIONTeleoperation or Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) control of social robotsis a pervasive method used in empirical studies of human-robotinteraction (HRI) [1]. Using WoZ control is usually framed as away to study human behavior with a robotic system that behavesin certain ways before it is potentially possible to build the systemin actuality (usually due to technological challenges that have yet tobe surmounted). We use WoZ to study future human behavior and togain key insights about how we might interact with robotic systems,which will inform how we design and build the actual robotic systemsin the future.WoZ is especially prevalent in child-robot interaction research,where technologies that help create autonomous interactions withrobots for adults (such as speech recognition) work less well. How-ever, despite the prevalence of WoZ paradigms, relatively few studieshave explored how children conceptualize robots in these studies,such as whether they are aware of the teleoperator, whether theirknowledge (or lack of knowledge) of a teleoperator changes theirbehavior with the robot, and how they construe robots as socialothers [2], [3]. Since we using WoZ primarily to garner insights aboutchildren’s interactions with future robotic systems, it behooves us totry to understand how children actually think about these systemsand how the experimental paradigms we use affect our studies. Forexample, we need to understand whether children’s behavior andfeelings will transfer from one robot to another, and whether ateleoperated system will have the same effects and be understoodthe same way as an autonomous system.II. RELATED WORKSome prior work in this area exists, but it is limited. In one study,children ages 5–13 played with the robots Cog and Kismet [3]. Then,the workings of the robot were demystified as children spent 20–30minutes learning about how the robots operated. Finally, childrenonce again interacted with the robot. Their interaction did not visiblychange after learning about the robot. To quote, “it was received asinteresting, some children even found it compelling. But it did notinterfere with the sense of relationship” [3].A similar encounter was described as a case study in [4]: afive-year-old boy played with a DragonBot robot, was shown howit had been teleoperated and was even given the opportunity toteleoperate it himself, but subsequently treated the robot and theteleoperator as separate beings—the robot was still its own self,despite human control. Finally, in [2], ten children ages 12–13interacted briefly with a teleoperated robot. Then the children weretold about the teleoperation, asked whether they had realized the robotwas teleoperated, and whether they thought it made a difference thatthe teleoperator was seen or not. Most of the children were unawareof the teleoperator, and the study did not report any negative (orpositive) consequences.III. RESEARCH QUESTIONSWe address two main questions in this work. The first questionis how do children conceptualize social robots, particularly in tele-operation studies? Who do they think they are interacting with—the robot? The wizard? As humans, we begin to categorize objectswe encounter in the world into two general categories soon afterbirth [5]: (1) alive, animate beings, such as plants and animals, and(2) inanimate objects, such as tables, rocks, and computers. Priorwork suggests that robots are not so simply categorized by children.Children may think of robots as in-between living and non-living [6],[7], attributing psychological and perceptual abilities but not biolog-ical properties to them [8]. The understanding children may haveof robots as “sort of this and sort of that”—with some combinationproperties held by pets, puppets, computers, and people—may makesense to them in a way that may not make sense to adults who followa stricter categorization scheme.It may be difficult to tease out whether children believe a robotis a social agent on its own or whether they are merely actingas if it is—engaging in pretense play or willing suspension ofdisbelief—but the distinction is crucial to explore [7]. Thus, dochildren think of the interaction as pretense play? Do children trulybelieve that the robot is its own fully autonomous self? Perhapschildren continuously and fluidly adjust their mental models of robotswhile interacting, such that they conceive of the robot as many thingsat once—alive, machine, teleoperated, etc. This question may havedifferent answers in different contexts—short-term versus long-termencounters, pediatrics versus education versus therapy, in one cultureversus another. We may see differences based on the child’s age andtheir prior experience with technology.Second, we want to understand what benefits or harms may comefrom using a WoZ paradigm. Specifically, does it matter whetherchildren know up front that a robot is being teleoperated? Given thatchildren may think of robots differently than adults, what effects (orlack of effects) might knowing about a teleoperator have on children’sinteractions with a social robot? For example, is their trust in the robotor in the experimenter affected?We could imagine that for older children and adults, knowledgeof a teleoperator may change their behavior. We may think ofteleoperation as deception and as an ethical concern—i.e., that bynot telling a person up front that a robot is teleoperated, they arebeing deceived into acting a particular way and treating the robot aparticular way [1], [9]. However, throughout scientific research, wedeceive participants in research studies. We do not tell participantsup front what a study is about because we do not want to biastheir behavior. The potential benefits of what we may learn outweighthe risk, and further, the risk can be minimal. While there is stilldebate about the acceptability of placebos and deception in socialpsychological research [9], it is generally accepted that some amountof deception is necessary for this basic research to occur.From this, then, we may also ask whether young children seeteleoperation as deceptive. And if so—given that the word “decep-tion” carries the negative connotation of lying—do children thinkthey are being lied to? How similar do they see teleoperation toother activities, such as pretend play, playing with pets, playing videogames, or talking to the puppets used by therapists? Children maythink of interaction with a social robot—teleoperated or not—as akind of technology-enabled pretend play. The primary question hereis whether it matters that children know up front that a robot is beingteleoperated, and what effects this may have.IV. PROPOSED STUDYA. MethodologyThe study will follow a 2×4 between-subjects design: age ofchildren (3yrs, 5yrs, 7yrs, 9yrs) × when they are told about theteleoperator (Before vs. After). Thirty children of each age groupwill be recruited. Children’s parents will sign a consent form andchildren will be asked to verbally assent to participate.Children will first be asked questions by an experimenter abouttheir expectations and prior conceptions of robots, such as a robot’semotional, physical, and mental capabilities and their past experiencewith technology. Then, the children in the Before condition will betold that they will play with a robot that is being controlled bya person, like a puppet. All children will then play a cooperativelearning game with a social robot for 10–20 minutes, which willallow the robot to be seen as a companion and teammate, and fora stronger relationship to develop. Following this, the experimenterwill reveal to the children in the After condition that the robot hadbeen controlled by a person. All children will be asked follow-upquestions to determine whether their thoughts and feelings about therobot had changed, and what they have learned. Video and audioof the interaction, along with all questionnaire responses, will berecorded and coded for relevant nonverbal behavior.B. HypothesesWe expect a significant interaction between knowledge of theteleoperator and children’s age. Younger children will care lessabout the teleoperator and treat the robot as a social other in bothconditions [6], [7]. Older children may feel more awkward and lessengagement in the Before condition, and thus perform fewer “social”behaviors (e.g., laughter, asking questions, leaning toward the robotvs. away) and learn less in the learning task due to lack of trust [10].Younger children will perform these behaviors and learn in bothconditions, perhaps more so in the Before condition since they knowthe robot is really a human whom they trust. Older children in theAfter condition may feel more negatively (e.g., about deception).C. Robot and TeleoperatorWe will use a Tega robot, an Android phone-based robot that iscovered in fur and designed to be appealing to young children. Theteleoperator will be trained by an expert on puppeteering the robotas a believable character. The teleoperator will follow a script fortriggering emotional body actions and facial expressions (so these areonly triggered at determined times) and speech playback (recordedaudio pitch-shifted to sound more child-like). The teleoperator willattend to children’s speech cues and their progress in the learninggame to determine which phrases to play next.V. FUTURE WORKThe proposed study is part of a series of studies investigatingyoung children’s conceptualization of social robots. What factors,such as the robot’s autonomy (or lack thereof), affect how theyperceive and respond to social robots? Children’s sense-making ofrobots may be a dynamic, sophisticated process. In this work, weuse teleoperation as lens through which to begin understanding howchildren conceptualize and understand social robots, but this just thefirst step, and only address some of the relvant variables.Follow-up work could examine many different variables, includingwhen the teleoperation is disclosed (i.e., before the interaction, afterone interaction, after several interactions), the age of children anddevelopmental differences, the embodiment and morphology of therobot, who discloses the teleoperation (e.g., the teleoperator, therobot, an experimenter, the child’s parent), whether the reveal isintentional (children are explicitly told) versus accidental (childrenaccidentally discover teleoperator), as well as the type of interactionthat child have with the robot (e.g., more personal and social versusa more generic conversation, tour, or game).REFERENCES[1] L. D. Riek, “Wizard of oz studies in HRI: a systematic review andnew reporting guidelines,” Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, vol. 1,no. 1, Aug. 2012.[2] J. Read, E. Mazzone, and J. Höysniemi, “Wizard of oz evaluationswith Children–Deception and discovery,” in Interaction Design andChildren, 2005.[3] S. Turkle, W. Taggart, C. D. Kidd, and O. Dasté, “Relational artifactswith children and elders: the complexities of cybercompanionship,”Connection Science, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 347–361, Dec. 2006.[4] J. Kory Westlund and C. Breazeal, “Deception, secrets, children, androbots: What’s acceptable?” in Workshop on The Emerging Policyand Ethics of Human-Robot Interaction, held in conjunction with the10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction,2015.[5] M. Legerstee, “A review of the animate-inanimate distinction in infancy:Implications for models of social and cognitive knowing,” Early Devel-opment and Parenting, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 59–67, 1992.[6] P. H. Kahn, T. Kanda, H. Ishiguro, N. G. Freier, R. L. Severson, B. T.Gill, J. H. Ruckert, and S. Shen, “"Robovie, you’ll have to go into thecloset now": Children’s social and moral relationships with a humanoidrobot.” Developmental psychology, vol. 48, no. 2, p. 303, 2012.[7] R. L. Severson and S. M. Carlson, “Behaving as or behaving as if?children’s conceptions of personified robots and the emergence of a newontological category,” Neural Networks, vol. 23, no. 8, pp. 1099–1103,2010.[8] J. L. Jipson and S. A. Gelman, “Robots and rodents: Children’s infer-ences about living and nonliving kinds,” Child development, vol. 78,no. 6, pp. 1675–1688, 2007.[9] L. D. Riek and D. Howard, “A code of ethics for the human-robotinteraction profession,” in WeRobot 2014 Conference, University ofMiami, 2014.[10] P. L. Harris, Trusting what you’re told: How children learn from others.Harvard University Press, 2012.

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