Book Description

Social robots are an interesting piece of technology, especially for children. Children are immediately drawn to them. The social relationship that starts to form between children and robots has a lot of potential to do good. For example, with the research in this dissertation we aim to contribute to the development of a social robot companion for children with cancer to help them cope with stress. However, once the novelty of the robot wears off after the first few encounters, and children notice it has not really anything to offer, they lose interest. This is one of the major challenges in the human-robot interaction community. We need to equip the robot with the right social abilities to keep children engaged and appropriately foster the child-robot relationship. This dissertation has two parts. In part I we designed and studied robot behaviors that could be used in a distractive intervention. For that purpose the interaction must really be meaningful and social for the children. The meaning is provided through storytelling. We developed six interaction design patterns that enable children to co-decide and co-create parts of the story and coordinate their involvement during the co-creation process. By inviting children to interact with a robot that used these patterns we were able to study the effects on the interaction. The results showed that children paid more attention to a robot that uses the patterns, enjoyed the interaction more, and could recall more about the stories. This tells us that the patterns successfully supported children's engagement. Equally important, children also feel more agency and competence to co-regulate the interaction when the patterns are used. The patterns contributed to a more social interaction between the child and the robot. In part II we designed and studied robot behaviors that would foster the child-robot relationship. We started with enabling the children to properly get acquainted with the robot. First impressions matter.