Progressive Development of an Autonomous Robot for Children through Parallel Comparison of Two Robots

This study proposes and demonstrates a progressive development method for an autonomous robot that is used for childhood education. The main concept in this method is to iteratively explore new behavioral factors and use them to progressively develop the robot by concurrently using and comparing two robots in a classroom. Usually, in classrooms for young children, it is practically difficult to recruit a sufficient number of participants and conduct many experiments. The parallel comparison employed in the proposed method enables rapid development to deal with these difficulties.