A practical experiment with interactive humanoid robots in a human society

Abstract

This paper reports a practical and long-term experiment with autonomous humanoid robots immersed in real human society. Students in an elementary school interacted with the robots over 18 days. The robot, "Robovie, " employs a novel system to identify individuals and adapt its behaviors to them. In this experiment, the robot spoke in English with Japanese students. We expected the students to form stable relationships with the robot by way of multi-modal communication and, as a result, improve their English language listening and speaking abilities. The experimental results show the possibility of the partner robot in language education and provide considerable insights into developing partner robots that are well suited to immersion in human society.