Infants Respond to Robot's Need for Assistance in Pursuing Action-based Goals

ABSTRACTInstrumental helping has been reported in infants toward other humans but not toward robots. Providing infants with opportunities for action-based assistance to robots might lead to more efficient infant-robot interactions. This paper presents preliminary findings on infants' spontaneous instrumental helping to robots exhibiting motion challenges, and proposes a novel decision-making model for infant-robot interaction that encompasses instrumental helping in its parameters; both in the context of pediatric rehabilitation. Six infants were engaged in a chasing game with a wheeled robot with the goal to follow the robot and ascend an inclined platform (8 sessions, 4 weeks). After infants' instrumental helping toward the robot was identified, a decision tree model was created to evaluate a set of annotated variables as potential predictors to the observed behavior. Next, a Markovian model for robot control was developed where these predictors were used as parameters to promote, in turn, action-based goals for the infants.