Adaptive social robot for sustaining social engagement during long-term children-robot interaction

One of the known challenges in Children Robot Interaction (cHRI) is to sustain children’s engagement during long-term interactions with robots. Researchers have hypothesised that robots that can adapt to children’s affective states, and can also learn from the environment, can result in sustaining engagement during cHRI. Recently, researchers have conducted a range of studies where robots portray different social capabilities and have shown that it has positively influenced children’s engagement. However, despite an immense body of research on implementation of different adaptive social robots, a pivotal question that remains unanswered: Which adaptations portrayed by a robot can result in maintaining long-term social engagement during cHRI. In other words, what are the appropriate and effective adaptations portrayed by a robot that will sustain social engagement for an extended number of interactions? In this paper, we report on a study conducted with three groups of children who played a snakes and ladders game with the NAO robot to address the aforementioned question. The NAO performed 1) Game based adaptations, 2) Emotion based adaptations and 3) Memory-based adaptation. Our results showed that emotion based adaptation was found out to be most effective followed by memory based adaptation. Game adaptation didn’t result in sustaining long-term social engagement.