A Mechanical Friend for Children

storytellers, but they have only been able to maintain human interest for a limited time and typically rely on the robot telling stories that change over time. In practice, commercially available robots seldom cross the 10-hour barrier (i.e. individual users tend to spend less than a combined total of 10 hours with the robots before losing interest). This observation is in sharp contrast to the long-term interactions and bonding that commonly develop between humans and their pets. B In a recent study, researchers from the Institute for Neural Computation in California introduced a state-of-the-art social robot into a classroom of 18- to 24-month-olds for five months as a way of studying human/robot interactions. The researchers, including Fumihide Tanaka and Javier R Movellan, introduced a toddler-sized humanoid robot into a classroom at a childhood education center. One of the QRIO series of robots, the 58cm machine, was originally developed by Sony. Children of toddler age were chosen because they have no preconceived notions of robots, according to Tanaka. One of the goals of the study was to establish whether it was possible for social robots to maintain the interest of children beyond the 10-hour barrier. C The…