Robots that can play with children: What makes a robot be a friend

Muhammad Attamimi, Kasumi Abe, Akiko Iwasaki, Takayuki Nagai, Takayuki Shimotomai, Takashi Omori

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this paper, a playmate robot system, which can play with a child, is proposed. Unlike many therapeutic service robots, our proposed system is implemented as a functionality of the domestic service robot with a high degree of freedom. This implies that the robot can use its body and toys for playing high-level games with children, i.e., beyond therapeutic play, using its physical features. The proposed system currently consists of ten play modules, including a chatbot, card playing, and drawing. To sustain the player's interest in the system, we also propose an action-selection strategy based on a transition model of the child's mental state. The robot can estimate the child's state and select an appropriate action in the course of play. A portion of the proposed algorithms was implemented on a real robot platform, and experiments were carried out to design and evaluate the proposed system.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNeural Information Processing - 20th International Conference, ICONIP 2013, Proceedings
Pages377-386
Number of pages10
EditionPART 1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013
Externally publishedYes
Event20th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2013 - Daegu, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 3 Nov 20137 Nov 2013

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
NumberPART 1
Volume8226 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference20th International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICONIP 2013
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CityDaegu
Period3/11/137/11/13

Keywords

  • Child's mental modeling
  • Markov decision process
  • Playmate robots

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