Scroll down for a video: The toddlers quickly lost interest when QRIO performed predictable and repetitive behaviours, like repeating the same song and dance routine. But if the robot's full repertoire was reinstated the children regained interest.
Credit: Machine Perception Laboratory, UCSD
ADELAIDE: To help create machines that are adept at socially interacting with people, scientists have taken their robots for a play session at the kindergarten. They found that toddlers accepted them as near equals.
Current commercially available storytelling robots have been shown to hold a child's interest for no more than ten hours in total, said a study detailing the research in the U.S. journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Timing is everything
Now experts in human-robot interaction, led by Fumihide Tanaka of the University of California in San Diego (UCSD), have succeeded in getting a robot called QRIO to spend 37 hours, over five months, dancing, giggling and interacting with children.
By the end of the experiment, the kids – aged between 18 and 24 months – appeared to treat the humanoid robot like a peer rather than a toy, they said.
"[T]he current robot technology is actually very close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialisation with human toddlers for sustained periods of time," said Tanaka. While appropriate social interaction comes easily to people, skills such as timing and understanding human intent are difficult to program into robots.
In their tests, the researchers found the children at the UCSD early childhood education centre displayed more socially interactive behaviours towards QRIO when the robot reacted to them. 'Reacting' included programming QRIO to hand objects to the children and to respond to touch by giggling when the children patted its head. The robot was also programmed to lie down as if going to sleep when it sensed it was low on power. The children would then put a blanket over it and say "night, night".
When the toddlers handled QRIO they were careful and gentle, as if to another child, but they treated a similar inanimate robot toy more roughly, handling it like a block. At first the children cried when QRIO fell over, but after a month they cried less and would help it stand up again by pushing it or pulling its hand.
However, they quickly lost interest when QRIO performed predictable and repetitive behaviours, like repeating the same song and dance routine over and over. But if the robot's full behavioural repertoire was reinstated the children regained interest.
"Close to autonomous"
The researchers hope that more advanced versions of robots like Sony's QRIO (short for 'quest for curiosity') could become personalised tutors to assist teachers in classrooms. A robotic tutor could react on the spot to social cues and approximate social skills like facial expression and eye gaze, they said.
"It is becoming clear that to achieve this goal we are going to [need to] endow machines with something akin to affect and emotion, not just traditional forms of intelligence," said co-author Javier Movellan from UCSD's Institute for Neural Computation.
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Touch-giggling contingency: QRIO giggles when the children touch its head. This simple contingency helped start the bonding process between
the children and QRIO. (Credit:UCSD). |
Ideally, social robots should be able to produce new behaviours based on their past experience by themselves, said Tanaka. QRIO's interaction with the toddlers was close to being autonomous, he said.
"In this study it is clearly demonstrated that a limited range of behaviours, however impressive, is nowhere near as important to social behaviour as being able to make appropriate responses from a broad repertoire of behaviours," commented associate professor David Powers, an expert in artificial intelligence and cognitive science at Flinders University in South Australia.
"This work needs to be taken seriously, but is at the early stages and there are many issues as to how to evaluate human-robot behaviour - the conclusions must be regarded as preliminary," he said.
robots
The google nemesis review has raised an important problem. If you have seen the Matrix Series you would probably have many questions now about the reality the we all live in. Robots can transform the reality but we have to take care about the a possible overtake that could happen if robots are pushed to the limit.
These robots can be more
These robots can be more better at work than humans but they can never take place and robots even sixth sense ones will always be robots but never HUMANS.