Play, Dreams and Imitation in Robota

Abstract

Imitation, play and dreams are as many means for the child to develop his understanding of the world and of its social rules. What if we were to have a robot we could play with? What if we could through play and daily interactions, as we do with our children, be a model for it and teach it (what?) to be human-like? I advocate the use of natural human-like interaction, such as imitation, speech and gestures, for developing likable, socially interactive robots. As an example, I present a prototype of toy robot, the Robota doll, which can engage in complex interaction with humans, involving speech, vision and touch. Robota learns the meaning of her users' speech through natural, imitation-based interactions.

Robota: Clever toy and educational tool

“…The Robota robots are being used in different experiments that investigate the use of toy robots for normal children and for children with disabilities. These studies have been reported elsewhere, see [3,6]. Here is a brief summary.…”

“…Robota must be capable of recognizing a number of key words and key phrases and of producing a sensible answer to any query. 3 For this assignment, students were left with the freedom of choosing the topic of interest of the robot. As a results, students chose the robot's character in accordance to their own interest.…”

“…While the above-mentioned studies have been reported elsewhere [3,6], the present paper focuses on the novel application of Robota as a laboratory platform in an introductory class to robotics taught at the undergraduate level. The class uses a set of 10 Robota robots.…”

Design of a biomimetic upper body for the humanoid robot robota

“…Among robots developed by private enterprise, we can cite Honda ASIMO [6], Sony Q-RIO [7], Fujitsu HOAP-1&-2 and HRP-2P [8] developed by the Kawada Industries. Among the robots developed by research groups, we can cite WABIAN [9] from the Waseda university in Japan, CLA and KENTA [10], [11] from the Tokyo university, COG [12] from the MIT or ARMAR [13] from Karlsruhe university 1 . While these platforms are by far much more advanced than the Robota robot, they, however, do not present a sufficient human-likeliness, as required by the children studies, in which Robota is involved.…”

“…The Robota project designs a series of biomimetic humanoid robots [1], [2]. Since 1998, Robota has being used as part of studies with autistic children [3], [4].…”