Research Article
Can Children Have a Relationship with a Robot?
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-19385-9_7, author={Tanya Beran and Alejandro Ramirez-Serrano}, title={Can Children Have a Relationship with a Robot?}, proceedings={Human-Robot Personal Relationships. Third International Conference, HRPR 2010, Leiden, The Netherlands, June 23-24, 2010, Revised Selected Papers}, proceedings_a={HRPR}, year={2012}, month={5}, keywords={}, doi={10.1007/978-3-642-19385-9_7} }- Tanya Beran
Alejandro Ramirez-Serrano
Year: 2012
Can Children Have a Relationship with a Robot?
HRPR
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-19385-9_7
Abstract
As the development of autonomous robots has moved towards creating social robots, children’s interactions with robots will soon need to be investigated. This paper examines how children think about and attribute features of friendship to a robot. A total of 184 children between ages 5 to 16 years visiting a science centre were randomly selected to participate in an experiment with an approximate even number of boys and girls. Children were interviewed after observing a traditional small 5 degree of freedom robot arm, perform a block stacking task. A set of experiments was conducted to measure children’s perceptions of affiliation with the robot. Content analysis revealed that a large majority would consider a relationship with the robot, and participate in friendship-type behaviors with it. Significant sex differences in how children ascribe characteristics of friendship to a robot were also found.