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In their book “How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence,” Pfeifer and Bongard put forth an embodied approach to cognition. Because of this position, many of their robot examples demonstrated “intelligent” behavior despite limited neural processing. It is our belief that neurorobots should attempt to follow many of these principles. In this article, we discuss a number of principles to consider when designing neurorobots and experiments using robots to test brain theories. These principles are strongly inspired by Pfeifer and Bongard, but build on their design principles by grounding them in neuroscience and by adding principles based on neuroscience research. Our design principles fall into three categories. First, organisms must react quickly and appropriately to events. Second, organisms must have the ability to learn and remember over their lifetimes. Third, organisms must weigh options that are crucial for survival. We believe that by following these design principles a robot's behavior will be more naturalistic and more successful. 

Tele-operated social robots (telerobots) offer an innovative means of allowing children who are medically restricted to their homes (MRH) to return to their local schools and physical communities. Most commercially available telerobots have three foundational features that facilitate child–robot interaction: remote mobility, synchronous two-way vision capabilities, and synchronous two-way audio capabilities. We conducted a comparative analysis between the Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR) and commercially available telerobots, focusing on these foundational features. Children who used these robots and these features on a daily basis to attend school were asked to pilot the HSR in a simulated classroom for learning activities. As the HSR has three additional features that are not available on commercial telerobots: (1) pan-tilt camera, (2) mapping and autonomous navigation, and (3) robot arm and gripper for children to “reach” into remote environments, participants were also asked to evaluate the use of these features for learning experiences. To expand on earlier work on the use of telerobots by remote children, this study provides novel empirical findings on (1) the capabilities of the Toyota HSR for robot-mediated learning similar to commercially available telerobots and (2) the efficacy of novel HSR features (i.e., pan-tilt camera, autonomous navigation, robot arm/hand hardware) for future learning experiences. We found that among our participants, autonomous navigation and arm/gripper hardware were rated as highly valuable for social and learning activities.