Can kids accept and use Cozmo robots over time?

A fascinating study from University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

A study investigating how children used a Cozmo robot provided to them has been published recently in the ACM Transactions of Human Robot Interaction. I liked this work because the authors from University of Amsterdam, Netherlands led by Dr. Chiara de Jong have meticulously documented their processes and analysis on how kids interact witha Cozmo robot. Let me present a short summary of this work.

Key Insights

The researchers explored how children's acceptance of a Cozmo robot evolves over time in a home setting. The main motivation behind this work is that most studies focusing on human-robot interaction research on the immediate interaction of a human when presented with a robot, but fail to look into why a human may not use a robot after some time. The Cozmo robot was chosen for the study because of many reasons: there is little reason for kids to dislike it, it can function autonomously when started from the app, its affordability, and that it is relatively stable and bug-free.

The r…