It might seem far fetched to think that your child could soon be making friends with a robot at nursery school, but that’s exactly the vision a group of scientists in America have. Their study has shown that children can learn to regard robots as human peers rather than toys.

The scientists from the University of California, in San Diego, conducted 45 study sessions, each lasting approximately 50 minutes, over 5 months. The children, aged between 10 months and two years old had a Sony developed robot called QRIO placed in a room with them, and were watched to see how they reacted and treated the machine.

The robot was controlled by an out of sight human who would send signals for it to perform simple actions such as giggle, dance, or turn its head. The robot was also programmed to lie down when its batteries were getting low.

Every session was videotaped, and the social interactions between the children and the robot were graded. To begin with, the kids touched the robot on its head and face, but nearer the end of the study only on its hands and arms, mimicking children’s behaviour to other humans.

The most significant find was that over time the kids began to think of the robot as less of a toy and more as a peer on a similar level to them. Compare this to the control objects of a teddy bear and an inanimate robot called Robby, which were also placed in the sessions, and were treated as a toy at all times, and largely ignored by the kids.

Dr Fumihide Tanaka, leader of the study at UCSD said:

“We are interested in making personal robots that assist teachers in educational settings and enrich the classroom environment.”

“The colourful teddy bear had elicited many hugs in previous observations with children this age. Surprisingly, it was ignored throughout the study. When children touched QRIO, they did so in a very careful manner. Robby, on the other hand, was treated like an inanimate object.”

So it looks like children’s imaginary friends could soon become reality, and take the form of a state of the art robot. This comes just days after a British AI researcher claimed that humans will be marrying robots by 2050.

I find it intriguing that if you give a machine even the vaguest semblances of human behaviour, children learn very quickly to accept it as an equal rather than underling.

The scientists are now developing robots that interact with the children for weeks at a time.

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Entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 11:49 pm under Robotics, Science and technology, Technology.

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