 interactions can be extended from minutes to the scale of days, thus forging longer-term constructive bonds between robot and user.”
The researchers will use the principles of embodied cognitive robotics to sustain believable, “any-depth social relationships” with users, specifically with young diabetic patients in a busy pediatric department at the Ospedale San Raffaele in Milan, as the ALIZ-E project takes pride in taking robots out of the lab and putting them to into the real world.
To be able to succeed, the Aliz-E Robot Companion must be able to establish itself cognitively in the long term. Only an interaction that provides a sense of continuity over long periods of time can provide the foundations necessary for a constructive relationship between human and robot. To do this, the ALIZ-E project will specifically explore robot-child interaction based on children’s open and imaginative responses to these artificial “creatures.” If they are successful, promising applications in the future include the development of effective educational companion robots.
A significant problem in human-robot interaction is that a child’s interest in the robot wears off after the initial novelty. It is important therefore for the robot to have a capacity for adaptivity so that interaction will continue, even if the robot doesn’t display any novel behavior to engage the child’s interest once more. For this, some capacity for memory is necessary to maintain important information about the user and the context. In a game used for an initial case study, for example, an Aliz-E Robot Companion engages the child with four different games, involving both verbal and physical interactions.
During game play, the Aliz-E Robot Companion adapts its communication and interaction style to the child’s behavior, particularly in these categories: communication (e.g., repeating child’s preferred expression), para-verbal parameters (e.g., speech rate, voice intensity, pause duration), non-verbal parameters (e.g., posture, simulated breath rate, gestures); and interaction parameters, (e.g. adapting games by playing with or without verbal guidance) and changing the type of game played (e.g., if the child is bored or if the game isn’t challenging enough).
The observations gathered lend support to the notion that such a robotic platform could be effective in communicating healthcare information to child users in entertaining and memorable ways. As such, the success of ALIZ-E in this research ultimately means revolutionizing health care and the educational field for children. (The case studies employed, and the ALIZ-E project as a whole, makes use of the Nao small humanoid robot, from French robotics company Aldebaran Robotics, as the test platform. This is controlled using Urbi, an open source program).
Now to build a robot that can remember where you put the car keys.