Robotic gaming companion to facilitate social interaction among children

Abstract

This study proposes a gaming companion robot to facilitate social interaction among children. Games have been one popular social communication tool for people, and we propose a novel approach to gaming communication using a robot. We have implemented a robot that is capable of playing a video game to facilitate social interaction in a game environment. We used autonomous control to allow the robot to play during the videogame, and the Wizard of OZ (WOZ) framework for interaction between human and robot before and after the game. The results show that the robot was able to play the game in a manner similar to how a human plays the game. The preliminary study with children showed that this new approach was useful to facilitate people's interactions. We describe and evaluate the robotic system in this paper.