This paper describes the design principle of our robot, Keepon, and reports the longitudinal observation of the interactions between the robot and children with developmental disorders. The robot, Keepon, is a small (12cm tall), simple (like a yellow snowman), soft (made of silicone rubber), creature-like robot, which was designed for studies on human social development and possible remedies for developmental disorders. We observed how children with developmental disorders interacted with the robot in an unconstrained playroom for more than a year (over 500 child-sessions). From these observations, we found that the children changed their ontological understanding of the robot, and consequently their way of interaction, as the interaction unfolded. We conclude that the robot's rather predictable responses gave the children a relaxed mood for spontaneous play, from which social communication with the robot and with another person would naturally emerge.
This paper proposes, "attention coupling", that is spatio-temporal coordination of each other's attention, as a prerequisite for human-robot social interaction, where the human interactant attributes mental states to the robot, and possibly vice versa. As a realization of attention coupling we implemented on our robots the capability of eye-contact (mutually looking into each other's eyes) and joint attention (looking at a shared target together). Observation of the interaction with human babies/children showed that the robots with the attention coupling capability facilitated in the babies/children social behavior, including showing, giving, and verbal interactions like asking questions.
We present here a progress report of our ongoing observation [2] of a group of preschoolers at three to four years of age interacting with an interactive robot. We placed the robot in their playroom and tele-controlled it from a remote room. The children showed not only individual actions, such as approach to, exploration of, and interaction with the robot, but also collective social actions, where the children spontaneously and actively situate the robot in their circle of, for example, playing house. We assume that the robot's simple appearance and comprehensive behavior derived (1) caretaking behavior from the children and (2) exchanging of such behavior among children, both of which would be important in the development of interpersonal communication and in pedagogical interventions to it.
Keepon is a small creature-like robot designed for simple, natural, nonverbal interaction with children. The minimal design of Keepon's appearance and behavior is meant to intuitively and comfortably convey the robot's ex- pressions of attention and emotion. For the past few years, we have been observing interactions between Keepon and children at various levels of physical, mental, and social de- velopment. With typically developing children, we have ob- served varying styles of play that suggest a progression in ontological understanding of the robot. With children suffer- ing from developmental disorders such as autism, we have observed interactive behaviors that suggest Keepon's design is effective in eliciting a motivation to share mental states. Finally, in developing technology for interpersonal coordi- nation and interactional synchrony, we have observed an im- portant role of rhythm in establishing engagement between people and robots. This paper presents a comprehensive sur- vey of work done with Keepon to date.
The paper proposes possible use of interactive robots in the remedial practice for children with autism, who have difficulties mainly in interpersonal communication. For this purpose, we built a small creature-like robot, Keepon, which was carefully designed to get autistic and non-autistic children involved in playful interaction. We observed how autistic children (2-4 years old) interacted with Keepon without any experimental setting or instructions in a playroom at a day-care center for children with special needs. From the longitudinal observation for a year and a half (totally, over 500 child-sessions), we found that Keepon's simple appearance and predictable responses gave the autistic children a playful and relaxed mood, in which they spontaneously engaged in dyadic play with Keepon, which would then expand into interpersonal communication where Keepon worked as the pivot of triadic play with adults or other children. Each child showed a different style and a different unfolding of interaction over time, which tell us a "story" of his or her personality and developmental profile, which would not be explained thoroughly by a diagnostic label like "autism".
We report a case study of the interaction of normal and autistic children with Infanoid, an upper-torso humanoid robot. Infanoid is capable of attentive and emotional interaction with humans through gaze, pointing, facial expressions, and so on. In the observational sessions, each of the children sat in front of Infanoid with his or her mother, gradually got into the loop of interaction spontaneously, where he or she played with the robot in a relaxed mood. We assume the relatively high predictability of Infanoid's behavior enabled the autistic child, as well as the normal children, to get into the playful interaction, from which the children could expand the horizon of social communications. This study suggests potential applicability of humanoids to remedial services as well as psychological investigation.
