Which robot behavior can motivate children to tidy up their toys?: design and evaluation of "ranger"

  • Authors:

  • Julia Fink;Séverin Lemaignan;Pierre Dillenbourg;Philippe Rétornaz;Florian Vaussard;Alain Berthoud;Francesco Mondada;Florian Wille;Karmen Franinović

  • Affiliations:

  • Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland;Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK), Zürich, Switzerland;Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK), Zürich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

We present the design approach and evaluation of our prototype called "Ranger". Ranger is a robotic toy box that aims to motivate young children to tidy up their room. We evaluated Ranger in 14 families with 31 children (2-10 years) using the Wizard-of-Oz technique. This case study explores two different robot behaviors (proactive vs. reactive) and their impact on children's interaction with the robot and the tidying behavior. The analysis of the video recorded scenarios shows that the proactive robot tended to encourage more playful and explorative behavior in children, whereas the reactive robot triggered more tidying behavior. Our findings hold implications for the design of interactive robots for children, and may also serve as an example of evaluating an early version of a prototype in a real-world setting.