How children interpret robots’ contextual behaviors in live theatre: Gaining insights for multi-robot theatre design

Robot theatre has been gradually used in children’s storytelling activities. The robotic character collaboratively exchange stories with children, react to their actions, and keep them engaged. However, the only robotic protagonist limits the richness of content and cannot fully support children’s creativity. To explore a tool with multiple robotic agents to better enhance story creation activities, we designed a simulated multi-robot theatre with three similarly shaped robots. We invited 28 kids (6-12 years old) to watch the video and retell the story. We encode children’s story recall and outline that robots’ contextual behaviors with emotion expression are reasonably enough for children over six-years-old to understand their performance. We also found no noticeable difference in story understanding among participants. We discuss the insights for designing robots’ contextual behaviors for story presentation and the considerations for implementing an accessible and feasible robot theatre creation platform.