Fieldworks for Investigating How Children Are Interacting with Sociable Trash Box

Abstract

We developed a Sociable Trash Box (STB) as a children-assisted robot that able to establish asynchronous child assistance with a social rapport network for the purpose of collecting trash from a public space. In this study, we explore the interactive pattern of children, optimum interpersonal spheres, and sociopetal space by considering the dynamic interaction of children (interactive time, distance between child-robot, and interactive angle according to the STB's perspective). An experiment was conducted in a Developmental Center for Children to evaluate the validity and effectiveness of our approach through five action scenarios: move toward trash (MT-I), communicate (electronically) with other STBs to move and create a distance (MT-G), move to a crowded space without communicating with other STBs (MC-I), move to a crowded space to communicate with other STBs (MC-G), and STBs do not move and behave (NMB-I, NMB-G). We apply a model-based unsupervised Mixture Gaussian to extract the optimum spaces when the children interacted with an individual social trash box (STB) and a group of STBs.