Robots as Informants: Learning with Social Robots

This project leverages emerging technologies in social robotics with recent findings from social, developmental, and cognitive psychology in an effort to design and initially implement/evaluate a new generation of robots that is capable of interacting with and instructing young learners in a truly social way.

Given growing recognition that the social aspects of children’s environments are central to their ability to learn rapidly and efficiently, we are developing a robot that can use social cues (e.g., motor mimicry and synchrony, affective cues, gaze direction) to help direct children’s learning. Indeed, our initial work demonstrates how the human mind implicitly responds to social cues emitted by a robot in the same was as it does to similar cues emitted by a human.

The goal is to maximize the social repertoire of a robotic system so that it can function not just as a disseminator of information, but also as an interlocutor incorporating social signals to which the learning mind is automatically attuned. We are exploring how that repertoire can be fine-tuned so as to better engage learners from different social groups.