Child-Robot Interaction. Methods, Epistemology, Applications

Robotics and artificial intelligence technologies are advancing at a rapid pace, enabling forms of direct, physical and cognitive interaction between robots and humans in a wide range of fields, from healthcare to education, from entertainment to personal assistance. Increasingly sophisticated, even humanoid, robots can now safely interact with children and serve as facilitators of teaching, learning, rehabilitation and therapeutic processes. These developments need to be critically monitored and reviewed. Robots can make a significant contribution to improving the quality of certain processes, but it is essential to identify the areas in which they can be more useful and to establish methodological and ethical guidelines for their use. With regard to education and training, it is important to reflect on the specific role they could play - peers, tutors, programmable tools? - and what benefits they can really bring to the field. What disciplinary and cross-curricular skills and competences can be developed using robots? What is it about robots that makes them more 'useful' in some interesting sense than other kinds of educational tools? How can learning objectives achieved with robots be extended and generalised to other domains? How are robots perceived and understood by teachers, educators and students, also depending on their cultural background? These questions cannot be addressed solely from the perspective of robotics research and development. They require collaboration between roboticists, psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, educators, teachers, pedagogists and health professionals. With a highly interdisciplinary perspective, this book aims at making some progress towards a critical and constructive reflection on if and how robots can improve the quality of children's lives and promote their personal growth.