Development of Activities for Human-Robot Interaction: Preliminary Results

The objective of the work described in this paper is to develop an interactive environment between a child and the humanoid robot ZECA. The robot is the mediator in the game, greeting and encouraging the child. The environment consists of two different activities, one to identify geometric figures and other to identify colours, each with two levels of difficulty. In the first level, the player must fill the empty spaces in a board with the correct figures/colours; in the second level, a piece (figure or colour) is requested by the robot and the player must present the corresponding piece. The image processing was developed in C++ with the OpenCV library. Using Qt Creator, it was created an interface where the user is able to control the execution of the activity. The application was tested with typically developing children between the ages of 3 and 5 years. The children reacted very positively and the tests allowed optimizing the experimental setup. The next step in the research is to test the system with children with autism spectrum disorders. The goal is to promote social and academic skills in these children by using a robot as a game partner.