Communications of the ACM
Um Researchers Are Studying Child-Mother Interactions to Design Robots With Social Skills
University of Miami developmental psychologists and computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are studying the interaction between infants and mothers, and will use the findings to program a baby robot to learn social skills.
In the first phase of the project the researchers learned that babies develop turn-taking skills, and the pattern of play becomes more stable and predictable with age. The project will use the findings to program Diego-San, a 1.3-meters-tall robot modeled after a one-year-old child built by Kokoro Dreams and UCSD's Machine Perception Laboratory. Diego-San will shift its gaze from people to objects using the same principles babies use to play and develop.
"A unique aspect of this project is that we have state-of-the-art tools to study development on both the robotics and developmental psychology side," says UCSD's Paul Ruvolo. "On the robotics side we have a robot that mechanically closely approximates the complexity of the human motor system and on the developmental psychology side we have a fine-grained motion capture and video recording that shows the mother infant action in great detail."
From University of Miami
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