Modelling empathic behaviour in a robotic game companion for children an ethnographic study in real-world settings

The idea of autonomous social robots capable of assisting us in our daily lives is becoming more real every day. However, there are still many open issues regarding the social capabilities that those robots should have in order to make daily interactions with humans more natural. For example, the ro...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:2012 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) pp. 367 - 374
Main Authors: Leite, Iolanda, Castellano, Ginevra, Pereira, André, Martinho, Carlos, Paiva, Ana
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 05.03.2012
IEEE
Series:ACM Conferences
Subjects:
Affect Recognition
Applied computing > Operations research > Industry and manufacturing > Command and control
Children
Educational institutions
Empathy
Encoding
Feature extraction
Games
Human-centered computing > Interaction design > Interaction design process and methods > User centered design
Interviews
Robot kinematics
Social Robots
affect recognition
empathy
children
social robots
ISBN:145031063X, 9781450310635
ISSN:2167-2121
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The idea of autonomous social robots capable of assisting us in our daily lives is becoming more real every day. However, there are still many open issues regarding the social capabilities that those robots should have in order to make daily interactions with humans more natural. For example, the role of affective interactions is still unclear. This paper presents an ethnographic study conducted in an elementary school where 40 children interacted with a social robot capable of recognising and responding empathically to some of the children's affective states. The findings suggest that the robot's empathic behaviour affected positively how children perceived the robot. However, the empathic behaviours should be selected carefully, under the risk of having the opposite effect. The target application scenario and the particular preferences of children seem to influence the degree of empathy that social robots should be endowed with.
ISBN:145031063X
9781450310635
ISSN:2167-2121
DOI:10.1145/2157689.2157811