You have full access to this open access article. Social robots, owing to their embodied physical presence in human spaces and the ability to directly interact with the users and their environment, have a great potential to support children in various activities in education, healthcare and daily life.
Child—Robot Interaction CRI , as any domain involving children, inevitably faces the major challenge of designing generalized strategies to work with unique, turbulent and very diverse individuals. Addressing this challenging endeavor requires to combine the standpoint of the robot-centered perspective, i. This article aims to help researchers bridge the two perspectives and proposes to address the development of CRI scenarios with insights from child psychology and child development theories.
To that end, we review the outcomes of the CRI studies, outline common trends and challenges, and identify two key factors from child psychology that impact child-robot interactions, especially in a long-term perspective: developmental stage and individual characteristics.
For both of them we discuss prospective experiment designs which support building naturally engaging and sustainable interactions. Child—Robot Interaction CRI , among other Human—Robot Interaction HRI topics, is a research area of ever-growing importance and interest, fuelled by the advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, and a worldwide rise of technology use by children [ 1 ].
The key trigger to researching and developing CRI scenarios, as well as the main reason for their complexity, is the breadth of tasks and challenges that children face during the relatively short and dynamic childhood period. In less than two decades a child has to master a vast range of skills and obtain a wealth of knowledge in order to become a successful adult.
