Exploiting Child-Robot Aesthetic Interaction for a Social Robot

A social robot interacts and communicates with humans by using the embodied knowledge gained from interactions with its social environment. In recent years, emotion has emerged as a popular concept for designing social robots. Several studies on social robots reported an increase in robot sociability through emotional imitative interactions between the robot and humans. In this paper conventional emotional interactions are extended by exploiting the aesthetic theories that the sociability of a social robot can be markedly enhanced through aesthetic imitative interactions such as “playful acts”. We applied these aesthetic interactions to child‐robot interaction. Children imitate the emotional behaviours of a robot through aesthetic interactions; they play with the robot by mimicking its emotional facial expressions. From the tests, we see that aesthetic judgment is more influential than emotions in playful interactions between children and the robot; the aesthetic imitative interactions would reinforce the positive social relationships of children and enhance their social adaptability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first social robot study to investigate child‐robot interaction on the basis of aesthetics