My favorite robotics conference, ACM/IEEE Human Robot Interaction (HRI) 2022 concluded last week. HRI usually has the best research topics in the areas of how humans will interact with robots, and I look forward to this conference every year. HRI also usually features research using the best state of the art consumer robots. Anki Cozmo and Anki Vector have been routinely showcased in research presentations at HRI; as an example, here is my summary of how Anki robots were demonstrated in HRI 2021.
For this year, the sessions that interested me most were the two sessions on “Robots for Children, ASD, Elderly People (1)”. In this blog post I will highlight a couple of research ideas that I found very interesting.
Paper 1: "Let's read a book together": A Long-term Study on the Usage of Pre-school Children with Their Home Companion Robot
This work considers how children and parents interacted with the Luka robot over a period of 180 days. Luka is a popular robot for pre-school children… it re…