Walking together hand in hand: Design and evaluation of autonomous robot system that a robot recognizes moving direction with a child's assistance of pulling its hand

The ability of walking together with children is important for future autonomous robots in terms of affecting the children's mental development as walking with someone is considered as a social act. Many research studies have focused on robot' s walking together with people where participants are mainly adults. However, these research were not targeted for children, and therefore, children are ignored when considering a walking together system. In addition, some of these studies used robots that were operated by remote control as the first step. In this paper, we propose a walking together system that enables a child to assist a robot by teaching the robot the moving direction. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by implementing our system on the personal robot Pepper and by conducting an experiment with nine child participants. In the experiment, the robot is supposed to walk with a child by having its hand pulled for recognizing the moving direction. A child walks in two ways during the experiment: One is walking in front of it and the other is walking besides it. Three trials are used for setting the proper experimental course. Six out of the nine participants walking data, five walking video data and inquiry results from nine participants are evaluated. This study contributes to the design of an autonomous robot system for children in that we consider the design by focusing on the behaviors which have social importance for children and conduct an experiment targeted for children users.