Robots are funky, but they tend to lose our interest pretty quickly. But make one sophisticated enough and toddlers are entertained for months 鈥� they even bond with it and treat it like a peer.
So found Javier Movellan and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego. They put a humanoid robot called QRIO (pronounced 鈥渃urio鈥�), developed by Sony, into a classroom of 18 to 24-month-old toddlers. The 60-centimetre-tall robot walks around, waves and giggles when patted on the head. Sensors help him to avoid bumping into people or walls. 鈥淲e expected that after a few hours the magic was going to fade,鈥� says Movellan. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 what has been found with earlier robots.鈥�
To his surprise, QRIO won the kids over. In fact, the interactions between the children and the robot gradually increased in quality over several months. As well as patting the robot more, the toddlers touched QRIO mostly on the arms and hands, as they do with each other, rather than on the head or legs. They also hugged it more than a similar-looking inanimate robot. For this age group 鈥渢he amount of touching is a good predictor of how you are doing as a social being鈥�, Movellan says. When QRIO was programmed to dance repetitively, however, the children soon lost interest (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
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The findings will encourage researchers developing robots for use in classrooms or to help autistic children, says Takayuki Kanda of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Japan.
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