Talk by Anara Sandygulova - Monday 13th April, 11:00 RLC D1 761

Research and commercial robots have infiltrated homes, hospitals and schools, becoming attractive and proving impactful for children’s healthcare, therapy, edutainment, and other applications. The focus of this work is to investigate a little explored issue of how children’s perception of the robot changes with age, and thus to create such a robot to adapt to these differences. In particular, this research investigates the impact of gender development on children interactions with a humanoid Nao robot. To this end, a series of experiments were conducted with children aged between 5 and 12 years old at primary schools in Dublin. The results suggest that children relate differently towards robot's perceived gender across age and gender groups and support the trends in gender development in cHRI.
In order to dynamically adapt to children's age and gender, a perception module was developed utilizing the Microsoft Kinect and a collected depth dataset of 3D body metrics of 428 children aged between 5 and 18 years old. This module is able to successfully determine children's gender with 99% accuracy and estimate children's age with an error of only 0.94 years. Finally, the system performed successfully at the "Imaginosity" children's museum where a humanoid Nao robot was able to dynamically adapt its gender through changing its voice to match child's gender. These findings are important to consider when designing robotic applications for children in order to increase robot’s perceived likeability, acceptance and engagement.