Abstract
This column aims to describe the characteristics of current cyberpsychology research in Europe. In particular, CyberEurope aims at describing the leading research groups and projects running on the other side of the Ocean.
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The main goal of the BabyRobot project is to create robots that analyze and track human behavior over time in the context of their surroundings (situational) using audio-visual monitoring in order to establish common ground and intention-reading capabilities. BabyRobot focuses on both typically developing (TD) children and those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as the user population. Children have unique communication skills and are quick and adaptive learners, eager to embrace new robotic technologies. This is especially relevant for special education where the development of social skills is delayed or never fully develops without intervention or therapy. Thus, one of the other goals of the project is to define, implement, and evaluate child–robot interaction application scenarios for developing specific socio-affective, communication, and collaboration skills in TD children and those with ASD. Specifically, their aim is to support not supplant the therapist or educator, working hand-in-hand to create a low-risk environment for learning and cognitive development. Breakthroughs in core robotic technologies are needed to support this research mainly in the areas of motion planning and control in constrained spaces, gestural kinematics, sensorimotor learning, and adaptation. The project also wants to push beyond the state-of-the-art in core robotic technologies to support natural human–robot interaction and collaboration for consumers, edutainment, and healthcare applications. BabyRobot's ambition is to create robots that can establish communication protocols and form collaboration plans on the fly, which is expected to have impact beyond the consumer and healthcare application markets addressed in this project.
An Interesting Sample: ASD Children
The BabyRobot project is a truly interdisciplinary effort bringing together experts from diverse areas working toward common goals. At the core of the proposed research agenda is cognitive robotics, that is, designing and building robots that have adaptive communication and collaboration skills very much like humans do. Machine learning algorithms for speech and gesture recognition, speech understanding, socio-affective state recognition, planning, and discourse modeling are some of the relevant component technologies for building such capabilities. In addition, in order to negotiate the semantics of the communicated information and the environment between the human and the robot, three more tools are needed: joint attentional mechanisms, establishing common ground, and sharing goals and intentions. When one or more of these tools are missing or underperforming, communication, collaboration, and learning is ineffectual for humans and machines alike. ASD children are a prime example where the core recognition and understanding function are intact, but joint attention, common grounding, and shared intentionality mechanisms are compromised, leading to poor performance in language learning, communication, and collaboration tasks. This makes the ASD population a natural choice for this line of research—child and robot learning and enhancing their communication capabilities hand-in-hand.
The BabyRobot project is centered around three use cases that will help identify, ground, develop, and evaluate the relevant set of technologies, as well as their application to child–robot interaction scenarios: (1) natural child–robot interaction scenarios that showcase the joint attention, common ground, and shared intentionality modules; (2) communication skill development and learning via tactile and language games; and (3) collaboration skill development and learning via dyadic and triadic interaction, using the robot as a mediator. The target populations are TD and ASD children, aged 6–10 years, interacting in their native language. Use cases 2 and 3 will be longitudinal studies in collaboration with educators (and therapists for ASD children) in order to evaluate and measure the progress in the child's communication and collaboration skills formally. The following languages are addressed in BabyRobot: English, Danish, Swedish, and Greek.