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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Dautenhahn, K., Werry, I., Rae, J., Dickerson, P., Stribling, P., Ogden, B.: Robotic Playmates: Analysing Interactive Competencies of Children with Autism Playing with a Mobile Robot. In: Dautenhahn, K., Bond, A., Canamero, L., Edmonds, B. (eds.) Socially Intelligent Agents—Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots, pp. 117–124. Kluwer Academic Publishers (2002)
Howard, A.M., Park, H.W., Kemp, C.C.: Extracting Play Primitives for a Robot Playmate by Sequencing Low-Level Motion Behaviors. In: Proc. of IEEE Int. Symp. on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, pp. 360–365 (August 2008)
Trevor, A.J.B., Park, H.W., Howard, A.M., Kemp, C.C.: Playing with Toys: Towards Autonomous Robot Manipulation for Therapeutic Play. In: Proc. of ICRA, pp. 2139–2145 (May 2009)
Park, H.W., Howard, A.M.: Understanding a Child’s Play for Robot Interaction by Sequencing Play Primitives Using Hidden Markov Models. In: Proc. of ICRA, pp. 170–177 (May 2010)
Attamimi, M., Mizutani, A., Nakamura, T., Nagai, T., Funakoshi, K., Nakano, M.: Real-Time 3D Visual Sensor for Robust Object Recognition. In: Proc. of IROS, pp. 4560–4565 (October 2010)
Attamimi, M., Mizutani, A., Nakamura, T., Sugiura, K., Nagai, T., Iwahashi, N., Okada, H., Omori, T.: Learning Novel Objects Using Out-of-Vocabulary Word Segmentation and Object Extraction for Home Assistant Robots. In: Proc. of ICRA, pp. 745–750 (May 2010)
Castellano, G., Pereira, A., Leite, I., Paiva, A., McOwan, P.W.: Detecting User Engagement with a Robot Companion Using Task and Social Interaction-based Features. In: Proc. of the 2009 International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, pp. 119–126 (November 2009)
Kinoshita, K., Konishi, Y., Lao, S., Kawade, M.: Facial Feature Extraction and Head Pose Estimation Using Fast 3D Model Fitting. In: MIRU 2008, pp. 1325–1329 (2008) (in Japanese)
Konishi, Y., Kinoshita, K., Lao, S., Kawade, M.: Real-Time Estimation of Smile Intensities. In: Proc. of Interaction 2008., vol. 4(2008), pp. 47–48 (2008) (in Japanese)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Attamimi, M., Abe, K., Iwasaki, A., Nagai, T., Shimotomai, T., Omori, T. (2013). Robots That Can Play with Children: What Makes a Robot Be a Friend. In: Lee, M., Hirose, A., Hou, ZG., Kil, R.M. (eds) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8226. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-42054-2_47
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-42054-2_47
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-42053-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-42054-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)