TAKING CARE

The researchers measured the bond between the children and the robot in several ways. Firstly, as with other toddlers, they touched QRIO mostly on the arms and hands, rather than on the face or legs. For this age group, “the amount of touching is a good predictor of how you are doing as a social being”, Movellan says.

The children also treated QRIO with more care and attention than a similar-looking but inanimate robot that the researchers called Robby, which acted as a control in the experiment. Once they had grown accustomed to QRIO, they hugged it much more than Robby, who also received far more rough treatment.

A panel, who watched videos of the interactions between the children and QRIO, concluded that these interactions increased in quality over several months.

Eventually, the children seemed to care about the robot’s well being. They helped it up when it fell, and played “care-taking” games with it – most commonly, when QRIO’s batteries ran out of juice and it lay down, a toddler would come up and cover it with a blanket and say “night, night”. Altering QRIO’s behaviour also changed the children’s attitude towards the robot. When the researchers programmed QRIO to spend all its time dancing, the kids quickly lost interest. When the robot went back to its old self, the kids again treated it like a peer again. |link via|