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We aim to design robotic educational support systems that can promote socially and intellectually meaningful learning experiences for students while they complete school work outside of class. To pursue this goal, we conducted participatory design studies with 10 children (aged 10–12) to explore their design needs for robot assisted homework. We investigated children’s current ways of doing homework, the type of support they receive while doing homework, and co-designed the speech and expressiveness of a homework companion robot. Children and parents attending our design sessions explained that an emotionally expressive social robot as a homework aid can support students’ motivation and engagement, as well as their affective state. Children primarily perceived the robot as a dedicated assistant at home, capable of forming meaningful friendships, or a shared classroom learning resource. We present key design recommendations to support students’ homework experiences with a learning companion robot. 

In this work, we discuss a theoretically motivated family-centered design approach for child-robot interactions, adapted by Family Systems Theory (FST) and Family Ecological Model (FEM). Long-term engagement and acceptance of robots in the home is influenced by factors that surround the child and the family, such as child-sibling-parent relationships and family routines, rituals, and values. A family-centered approach to interaction design is essential when developing in-home technology for children, especially for social agents like robots with which they can form connections and relationships. We review related literature in family theories and connect it with child-robot interaction and child-computer interaction research. We present two case studies that exemplify how family theories, FST and FEM, can inform the integration of robots into homes, particularly research into child-robot and family-robot interaction. Finally, we pose five overarching recommendations for a family-centered design approach in child-robot interactions. 

The goal of this workshop is to have interdisciplinary discussions on family-centered interaction design of technology as an extension to child-centered design. The workshop will discuss the potential benefits of a family-centered approach to design, as well as the challenges and open questions that designers may face when adopting this approach. Through discussions and interactive activities, participants will have the opportunity to discuss and share ideas on how to effectively incorporate a family-centered perspective into their own design processes. A family-centered approach to design has the potential to create more meaningful and contextual experiences for children and their families. 

Robotic technology can support the creation of new tools that improve the creative process of cinematography. It is crucial to consider the specific requirements and perspectives of industry professionals when designing and developing these tools. In this paper, we present the results from exploratory interviews with three cinematography practitioners, which included a demonstration of a prototype robotic system. We identified many factors that can impact the design, adoption, and use of robotic support for cinematography, including: (1) the ability to meet requirements for cost, quality, mobility, creativity, and reliability; (2) the compatibility and integration of tools with existing workflows, equipment, and software; and (3) the potential for new creative opportunities that robotic technology can open up. Our findings provide a starting point for future co-design projects that aim to support the work of cinematographers with collaborative robots. 

Research in child-robot interactions suggests that engaging in “care-taking” of a social robot, such as tucking the robot in at night, can strengthen relationships formed between children and robots. In this work, we aim to better understand and explore the design space of caretaking activities with 10 children, aged 8–12 from eight families, involving an exploratory design session followed by a preliminary feasibility testing of robot caretaking activities. The design sessions provided insight into children’s current caretaking tasks, how they would take care of a social robot, and how these new caretaking activities could be integrated into their daily routines. The feasibility study tested two different types of robot caretaking tasks, which we call connection and utility, and measured their short term effects on children’s perceptions of and closeness to the social robot. We discuss the themes and present interaction design guidelines of robot caretaking activities for children. 

Social robots are emerging as learning companions for children, and research shows that they facilitate the development of interest and learning even through brief interactions. However, little is known about how such technologies might support these goals in authentic environments over long-term periods of use and interaction. We designed a learning companion robot capable of supporting children reading popular-science books by expressing social and informational commentaries. We deployed the robot in homes of 14 families with children aged 10–12 for four weeks during the summer. Our analysis revealed critical factors that affected children’s long-term engagement and adoption of the robot, including external factors such as vacations, family visits, and extracurricular activities; family/parental involvement; and children’s individual interests. We present four in-depth cases that illustrate these factors and demonstrate their impact on children’s reading experiences and discuss the implications of our findings for robot design. 

Social robots are increasingly introduced into children’s lives as educational and social companions, yet little is known about how these products might best be introduced to their environments. The emergence of the “unboxing” phenomenon in media suggests that introduction is key to technology adoption where initial impressions are made. To better understand this phenomenon toward designing a positive unboxing experience in the context of social robots for children, we conducted three field studies with families of children aged 8 to 13: (1) an exploratory free-play activity (n = 12); (2) a co-design session (n = 11) that informed the development of a prototype box and a curated unboxing experience; and (3) a user study (n = 9) that evaluated children’s experiences. Our findings suggest the unboxing experience of social robots can be improved through the design of a creative aesthetic experience that engages the child socially to guide initial interactions and foster a positive child-robot relationship. 

As social robots become increasingly prevalent in day-to-day environments, they will participate in conversations and appropriately manage the information shared with them. However, little is known about how robots might appropriately discern the sensitivity of information, which has major implications for human-robot trust. As a first step to address a part of this issue, we designed a privacy controller, CONFIDANT, for conversational social robots, capable of using contextual metadata (e.g., sentiment, relationships, topic) from conversations to model privacy boundaries. Afterwards, we conducted two crowdsourced user studies. The first study (n = 174) focused on whether a variety of human-human interaction scenarios were perceived as either private/sensitive or non-private/non-sensitive. The findings from our first study were used to generate association rules. Our second study (n = 95) evaluated the effectiveness and accuracy of the privacy controller in human-robot interaction scenarios by comparing a robot that used our privacy controller against a baseline robot with no privacy controls. Our results demonstrate that the robot with the privacy controller outperforms the robot without the privacy controller in privacy-awareness, trustworthiness, and social-awareness. We conclude that the integration of privacy controllers in authentic human-robot conversations can allow for more trustworthy robots. This initial privacy controller will serve as a foundation for more complex solutions. 

Emotion expression in human-robot interaction has been widely explored, however little is known about how such expressions should be coupled with feelings and opinions expressed by a social robot. We explored how 12 children experienced emotionally expressive social commentaries from a reading companion robot across five interaction styles that differed in their non-verbal emotional expressiveness and opinionated conversational styles (neutral, divergent, or convergent opinions). We found that, while the robot’s opinions and non-verbal emotion expressions affected children’s experiences with the robot, the speech content of the commentaries was the more prominent factor in their experience. Additionally, children differed in their perceptions of social commentary: while some expressed a sense of connection-making with the robot’s self-disclosure commentaries, others felt distracted by them or felt like the robot was off-topic. We recommend designers pay particular attention to the robot’s speech content and consider children’s individual differences in designing emotional and opinionated speech.