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 recognizes and reads over 20,000 English picture books, and over 70,000 Chinese titles. Parents or children can pick up a picture book that they want their child to read. Luka will recognize the page in the book and read it out to them. I found Luka’s advertisement video pretty interesting.

In this study, the authors tracked a group of 20 children and their families with an aim to gain insight into the long-term usage of a social robot in their homes and provide an understanding of how and why both parents and children use a robot. The paper reports some very interesting finding which will help robot designers and manufacturers build better robots. As an example the authors concluded that the lag of Luca responding to seeing a book page to actually start reading it was one of the biggest obstacles they faced… children would frequently get impatient when Luca did not respond quickly. Another finding which is shared by other researchers is that the design of the robot, such as, the robot’s eyes, and robot texture were key attributes which made children interested in the robots.

The full version of the paper can be found here.

Paper 2: Robot-Mediated Interaction Between Children and Older Adults: A Pilot Study for Greeting Tasks in Nursery Schools

In this work, researchers carried out a study by deploying the Sota robot in a nursery school in Japan, and having older adults greet nursery pupils on their way to and
from school with the remotely operated (teleoperated) Sota robot. This work highlights the importance of robot-mediated interaction between children and older adults. An older adult remotely controls a social robot and the child interacts with it face-to-face. That is, the interaction between children and older adults made possible through remote interaction can help minimize the risk of infections (a very important factor as we work our way through COVID-19) and relax the limitations caused by the physical deterioration of the older adults who might not have the capability to drive each morning to a nursery school.

The study found that robot-mediated interaction can be a mutually beneficial interaction for both parties: old people and young kids. The study also suggests that robot-mediated interactions have some advantages compared to possible alternatives of (i) face-to-face and (ii) video-mediated ones. A child-friendly appearance of a robot can increase opportunities for interaction. A new teleoperator can inherit the close relation ships built up by the previous teleoperator even if the teleoperator is replaced.

The full version of the paper can be found here.

In the coming posts, I will discuss some more topics from HRI 2022. All proceeding from HRI 2022 are available free of cost over here, so I will encourage everyone to use this invaluable resource that HRI has provided to the community.