Publication
Initial test of “BabyRobot” behaviour on a teleoperated toy substitution: Improving the motor skills of toddlers
Conference Article
Conference
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2022)
Edition
2022
Pages
708-712
Doc link
https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889522
File
Authors
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Canas, Eric
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Garcia, Alba Maria
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Angulo Bahon, Cecilio
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Garrell Zulueta, Anaís
Abstract
This article introduces “Baby Robot”, a robot designed to improve infants’ and toddlers’ motor skills. This robot is a car-like toy that moves autonomously by using reinforcement learning and computer vision. Its behaviour consists of escaping from a target infant that has been previously recognized, or at least detected, without compromising the infant’s security by avoiding obstacles. Regarding other robots that share this purpose, there is a variety of commercial toys available on the market; however, no one is betting on an intelligent autonomous movement, since they use to repeat simple, yet repetitive movements. In order to examine how that autonomous movement may improve infants’ mobility, two crawling toys –one in representation of “Baby Robot”– were tested in a real environment. These real-life experiments were conducted with a safe and approved surrogate of our proposed robot in a kindergarten, where a group of infants interacted with the toys. Improvements in the efficiency of the play-session were detected.
Categories
mobile robots, service robots.
Author keywords
crawling, infant, toddler, toy, robot, motor skills
Scientific reference
E. Canas, A.M. Garcia, C. Angulo and A. Garrell Zulueta. Initial test of “BabyRobot” behaviour on a teleoperated toy substitution: Improving the motor skills of toddlers, 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2022, Sapporo, Japan, pp. 708-712.
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