Passage 3.
Toddlers Bond with Robot
A.
Will the robot revolution begin in nursery school? Researchers 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 children not only
came to accept the robot,but treated it as they would a human buddy -
hugging it and helping it - a new study says. "The results imply that current
robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and
socialization with human toddlers," said Fumihide Tanaka, a researcher at the
University of California, San Diego.
B.
The development of robots that interact socially with people has been
difficult to achieve, experts say, partly because such interactions are hard to
study. "To my knowledge, this is the first long-term study of this sort," said
Ronald Arkin, a roboticist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who was not
involved with the study. "It is groundbreaking and helps to forward
human-robot interaction studies significantly," he said.
C.
The most successful robots so far have been storytellers, but they have
only been able to hold human interest for a limited time. For the new study,
researchers introduced a toddler-size humanoid robot into a classroom at a
UCSD childhood education center.Initially the researchers wanted to use a
22-inch-tall model, but later they decided to use another robot of the QRIO
series, the 23-inch-tall (58-centimeter-tall) machine was originally developed
by Sony. Children of toddler age were chosen because they have no
preconceived notions of robots, said Tanaka, the lead researcher, who also
works for Sony. The researchers sent instructions about every two minutes to
the robot to do things like giggle, dance, sit down, or walk in a certain
direction. The 45 sessions were videotaped, and interactions between
toddlers and the robot were later analyzed.
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