A robotic edutainment framework for designing child-robot interaction scenarios

This paper presents the development of a child-robot interaction (CRI) system for edutainment scenarios, aiming to provide a framework for their design and to simplify access to social robots by educators with non-specialized technical knowledge in this challenging area. Our framework incorporates powerful robotic perception modules for action and emotion recognition of the interacting child, allowing the robot to exhibit empathy and be informed of the child’s activity. Both developed modules are evaluated on respective datasets, outperforming the current state-of-the-art by a significant margin, while retaining low computational cost. The modules are complemented by off-the-shelf automatic speech recognition and synthesis components to further enable and enrich edutainmment-focused CRI. Moreover, the developed framework allows custom CRI scenario-building via a suitable graphical user interface, providing a valuable asset to educators wishing to utilize social robots in the classroom.