Children’s perceptions of social robots: a study of the robots Pepper, AV1 and Tessa at Norwegian research fairs

Abstract

This article studies perceptual differences of three social robots by elementary school children of ages 6–13 years (n = 107) at research fairs. The autonomous humanoid robot Pepper, an advanced social robot primarily designed as a personal assistant with movement and mobility, is compared to the teleoperated AV1 robot—designed to help elementary school children who cannot attend school to have a telepresence through the robot—and the flowerpot robot Tessa, used in the eWare system as an avatar for a home sensor system and dedicated to people with dementia living alone. These three robots were shown at the Norwegian national research fair, held in every major Norwegian city annually, where children were able to interact with the robots. Our analysis is based on quantitative survey data of the school children concerning the robots and qualitative discussions with them. By comparing three different types of social robots, we found that presence can be differently understood and conceptualized with different robots, especially relating to their function and “aliveness.” Additionally, we found a strong difference when relating robots to personal relations to one’s own grandparents versus older adults in general. We found children’s perceptions of robots to be relatively positive, curious and exploratory and that they were quite reflective on their own grandparent having a robot.

Children’s Imaginaries of Robots for Playing With

“…The children also perceived a robot as being a companion. These findings tell us that the social imaginary of a robot from a child's perspective is guided, as pointed out by Søraa and colleagues, by an emotional connection with the robot, rather than by a rationally driven notion of the robot's usefulness [15]. Our results are also consistent with [16], who found that from a child's perspective robots are entities with which children can form social relationships.…”

“…It has been reported that access to high-quality education is limited in rural settings [33], that family income in urban settings is significantly higher than in rural families, and that the level of education is 56% lower for rural men and 49% for rural women than that for people living in cities [34]. Another explanation for the technical details provided by the children in the urban setting might be what Søraa and colleagues [15] called "technological determinism." How a child imagines what a robot is and does is based on learned experience predetermined by exposure to existing robots.…”

“…With less exposure to commercially available robots, the children in the rural setting were less prone to be influenced by technological determinism. Including children with less exposure to what adults have established as "a robot" could help to shift the paradigm from children adapting to robots based on adults imaginaries, in the sense described in [20], to shaping social robots based on children's imaginaries, which is an emergent approach [15,17].…”

“…the time of an interaction with a robot or a scripted child-robot interaction). Other researchers have found that design choices such as material, size, and degree of mobility influence children's acceptance of robots [15].…”

Engaging older adults with a migration background to explore the usage of digital technologies in coping with dementia

“…The fact that it was a tablet, a physical object, made it an artifact with which people started to talk in their native language. This affectionate reaction is achieved with such artifacts, rather than with apps (35). Apparently, including an avatar that invoked culturally positive meanings facilitated the creation of such an affectionate relationship as well.…”