Initial Test of “BabyRobot” Behaviour on a Teleoperated Toy Substitution: Improving the Motor Skills of Toddlers

This article introduces “Baby Robot”, a robot designed to improve infants' and toddlers' motor skills. This robot is a car-like toy that moves autonomously by using reinforcement learning and computer vision. Its behaviour consists of escaping from a target infant that has been previously recognized, or at least detected, without compromising the infant's security by avoiding obstacles. Regarding other robots that share this purpose, there is a variety of commercial toys available on the market; however, no one is betting on an intelligent autonomous movement, since they use to repeat simple, yet repetitive movements. In order to examine how that autonomous movement may improve infants' mobility, two crawling toys-one in representation of “Baby Robot” - were tested in a real environment. These real-life experiments were conducted with a safe and approved surrogate of our proposed robot in a kindergarten, where a group of infants interacted with the toys. Improvements in the efficiency of the play-sassion were detected.