Humanoid Robots for Searching and Kicking a Ball and Dancing

Abstract

The application of humanoid robots has been popular in the field of healthcare and education. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, most people are isolated at home. People in isolation are constantly looking for new entertainment activities. Therefore, entertaining robots would become people's best partner in home isolation. In this article, the possibility of an entertainment robot for isolated people from the perspective of human factors is studied. NAO is an autonomous, programmable humanoid robot developed by the French Aldebaran Robot Company. Because of its cute appearance and ability to talk to people, we use NAO for this study. When isolated at home, parents might need to work at home and not have time to spend time with their children. A robot for children has entertaining capabilities such as playing soccer and dancing to teach soccer knowledge to children. Experimental results show that NAO can learn to search and kick a ball and dance to entertain children at home in the COVID-19 pandemic.