Cocoro Nakagawa

Keepon : A Playful Robot for Research, Therapy, and Entertainment (Original Paper)

Keepon is a small creature-like robot designed for simple, natural, nonverbal interaction with children. The minimal design of Keepon’s appearance and behavior is meant to intuitively and comfortably convey the robot’s expressions of attention and emotion. For the past few years, we have been observing interactions between Keepon and children at various levels of physical, mental, and social development. With typically developing children, we have observed varying styles of play that suggest a progression in ontological understanding of the robot. With children suffering from developmental disorders such as autism, we have observed interactive behaviors that suggest Keepon’s design is effective in eliciting a motivation to share mental states. Finally, in developing technology for interpersonal coordination and interactional synchrony, we have observed an important role of rhythm in establishing engagement between people and robots. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of work done with Keepon to date.

Children-robot interaction: a pilot study in autism therapy.

We present here a pilot study of child-robot interactions, in which we discuss developmental origins of human interpersonal communication. For the past few years, we have been observing 2- to 4-year-old children with autism interacting with Keepon, a creature-like robot that is only capable of expressing its attention (directing its gaze) and emotions (pleasure and excitement). While controlled by a remote experimenter, Keepon interacted with the children with its simple appearance and actions. With a sense of curiosity and security, the children spontaneously approached Keepon and engaged in dyadic interaction with it, which then extended to triadic interactions where they exchanged with adult caregivers pleasure and surprise they found in Keepon. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of these unfolding interactions suggests that autistic children possess the motivation to share mental states with others, which is contrary to the commonly held position that this motivation is impaired in autism. We assume Keepons minimal expressiveness helped the children understand socially meaningful information, which then activated their intact motivation to share interests and feelings with others. We conclude that simple robots like Keepon would facilitate social interaction and its development in autistic children.

Can a robot empathize with people

This article explores a robotogenetic model of empathetic understanding of another mind as one of the capabilities required in human–robot social interactions. The term “robotogenetic” means that we implement a possible ontogeny (i.e., developmental process) of the social capability onto a robotic embodiment with a certain phylogenetic background (i.e., innate prerequisites). First, we look into infants’ development of social and communicative skills, especially of empathetic understanding of others. We then consider two fundamental abilities, namely eye-contact and joint attention, as the prerequisites for this cognitive development. Then in psychological experiments using robots that are capable of eye-contact and joint attention, we observe how people, especially infants and children, attribute mental states to the robots. Based on these investigations, we consider a possible mechanism of empathy which is based on the spatiotemporal coordination of attention and bodily movement between the self and another.

Interactive Robots as Facilitators of Childrens Social Development

Early communication between a child and a caregiver is mainly embodied through touch and eyecontact, which convey various kinds of emotional information (Kaye, 1982; Trevarthen, 2001). This communication of emotion develops into joint attention (Butterworth & Jarrett, 1991), where both alternate between looking at the same object or event and looking at each other. By mutually monitoring emotions and attention in this way, the child and the caregiver share awareness of a topical target as well as emotional attitudes towards it. Thus, the child can learn the meaning and value of various objects and events in the world, which leads him or her to the acquisition of language and culture (Tomasello, 1993, 1999). With inspiration from the psychological study of social development, we have developed a childlike robot, Infanoid (Kozima, 2002), and a creature-like robot, Keepon (Kozima et al., 2004), as research platforms for testing and elaborating on psychological models of human social intelligence and its development in real-world settings. We are currently implementing on these robots software modules required for embodied interaction with people, especially with children. In addition, we are observing and analyzing social development in children when they interact with these robots. These two complementary research activities will help us to model social communication and its development during the first years of life. This paper describes design principles of interactive robots for the cognitive study of human social intelligence and for the development of pedagogical and therapeutic services for children’s social development. After reviewing recent psychological findings on children’s social development and recent advances in robotics facilitating social interaction with children, we discuss design principles that make robots capable of embodied interaction with children. We introduce our robotic platforms, Infanoid and Keepon, as examples of implementation of these design principles. We then describe how typically-developing children interact with Infanoid and Keepon, from which we model how social interaction dynamically unfolds as time passes and how such interactions qualitatively change with age. We have conducted longitudinal field observations of a group of children with developmental disorders and a group of typically-developing preschool children interacting with Keepon. We learned from these observations that an appropriately designed robot could facilitate not only dyadic interaction between a child and the robot, but also triadic interaction among children and carers, where the robot functions as a pivot of the interpersonal interactions. Finally, we discuss the possible use of interactive robots in pedagogical and therapeutic services for typically-developing children and for those with developmental disorders, especially autistic spectrum disorders.

Designing and observing human-robot interactions for the study of social development and its disorders

This paper describes the design principle of our robot, Keepon, and reports the longitudinal observation of the interactions between the robot and children with developmental disorders. The robot, Keepon, is a small (12cm tall), simple (like a yellow snowman), soft (made of silicone rubber), creature-like robot, which was designed for studies on human social development and possible remedies for developmental disorders. We observed how children with developmental disorders interacted with the robot in an unconstrained playroom for more than a year (over 500 child-sessions). From these observations, we found that the children changed their ontological understanding of the robot, and consequently their way of interaction, as the interaction unfolded. We conclude that the robots rather predictable responses gave the children a relaxed mood for spontaneous play, from which social communication with the robot and with another person would naturally emerge.

Social interaction facilitated by a minimally-designed robot: Findings from longitudinal therapeutic practices for autistic children

This paper reports our longitudinal observation of unconstrained child-robot interaction at a daycare center for autistic children. We used a simple robot, Keepon, that is only capable of expressing its attention (directing its gaze) and emotions (pleasure and excitement). While controlled by a remote experimenter, Keepon interacted with the children with its simple appearance and actions. With a sense of curiosity and security, the children spontaneously approached Keepon and engaged in dyadic interaction with it, which then extended to triadic interactions where they exchanged with adult caregivers pleasure and surprise found in Keepon. The three-year-long observation suggests that autistic children possess the motivation to share mental states with others, which is contrary to the commonly held position that the motivation is impaired in autism. Autistic children, however, have difficulty rather in sifting out socially meaningful information (e.g., attention and emotions) from flooding perceptual information. Keepon, with its minimal expressiveness, directly conveyed socially meaningful information to the children, which activated their intact motivation to share interests and feelings with others. We conclude that social filtering is one of the prerequisites for interpersonal communication and that robots like Keepon can facilitate social filtering and its development in autistic children.

A humanoid in company with children

We report a case study of the interaction of normal and autistic children with Infanoid, an upper-torso humanoid robot. Infanoid is capable of attentive and emotional interaction with humans through gaze, pointing, facial expressions, and so on. In the observational sessions, each of the children sat in front of Infanoid with his or her mother, gradually got into the loop of interaction spontaneously, where he or she played with the robot in a relaxed mood. We assume the relatively high predictability of Infanoids behavior enabled the autistic child, as well as the normal children, to get into the playful interaction, from which the children could expand the horizon of social communications. This study suggests potential applicability of humanoids to remedial services as well as psychological investigation.

A robot in a playroom with preschool children: Longitudinal field practice

We present here a progress report of our ongoing observation [2] of a group of preschoolers at three to four years of age interacting with an interactive robot. We placed the robot in their playroom and tele-controlled it from a remote room. The children showed not only individual actions, such as approach to, exploration of, and interaction with the robot, but also collective social actions, where the children spontaneously and actively situate the robot in their circle of, for example, playing house. We assume that the robots simple appearance and comprehensive behavior derived (1) caretaking behavior from the children and (2) exchanging of such behavior among children, both of which would be important in the development of interpersonal communication and in pedagogical interventions to it.