NRI: An autonomous curious social robot with a mindset for long-term interaction

 描述（由申请人提供）： 影响儿童心理健康、学业成绩和幸福感的认知感知和行为的三个核心领域是：1）好奇心; 2）心态; 3）对挑战性环境的适应力。求知欲是促进学习欲望的基石特征，是在学习过程中普遍存在的障碍下继续探索的内在动力。固定或成长的心态对孩子的学业和社会成就有重大影响。两者都被证明是可塑的，容易受到社会互动的影响。最后，嵌入环境及其带来的挑战有助于塑造孩子们对自己能力和技能的看法。儿童社交机器人伴侣在增强父母和教师的发展，学习和促进儿童的学术成就和福祉方面具有很大的前景。虽然前面提到的一些概念已经开始在机器人建模中进行探索，但在具有挑战性的环境中结合好奇心和心态的全面表达性认知架构，以实现儿童自主，参与和长期的机器人伴侣并不存在。该项目的长期目标是通过与社交机器人伴侣的互动来促进儿童的好奇心和成长心态。该项目的具体目标是首先开发和评估一种新颖的，富有表现力的，认知情感的架构，通过协同整合人工好奇心，对思维方式的理解和表达性社会行为的模型，以推进机器人伴侣的最新发展。第二个具体目标是通过进行为期6个月的纵向研究来评估机器人伴侣对儿童好奇心和心态的影响，在该研究中，儿童将与机器人伴侣玩耍和互动。该项目旨在开发一种社交机器人伴侣，可以表达和促进好奇心和成长心态。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Three core areas of children's cognitive perceptions and behaviors that influence their mental health, academic achievements and wellbeing are 1) curiosity, 2) mindset and 3) their resilience to challenging environments. Curiosity is the cornerstone characteristic that promotes one's desire to learn and the intrinsic motivation to continue exploring in spite of obstacles that are ubiquitous in the learning process. A fixed or growth mindset has significant impact on children's academic and social achievements. Both have been shown to be malleable and susceptible to influence via social interaction. Finally, the embedding environment and the challenges it presents, serves to shape children's perception of their own capabilities as well as their skills. Social robot companions for children hold great promise in augmenting parents and teachers in the development, learning and promotion of academic achievements and wellbeing of children. While some of aforementioned concepts have begun to be explored in robotics modeling, a comprehensive expressive cognitive architecture that incorporates curiosity and mindset in a challenging environment, to achieve an autonomous, engaging and long-term robot companion for children does not exist. The long-term goal of the proposed project is to promote children's curiosity and growth mindset via interaction with a social robot companion. The project specific aim are to first develop and evaluate a novel, expressive, cognitive-affective architecture, by synergistically integrating models of artificial curiosity, understanding of mindsets, and expressive social behaviors to advance the state-of the-art of robot companions. The second specific aim is to evaluate the robot companion's influence on children's curiosity and mindset, by conducting a 6-month longitudinal study in which children will play and interact with the robot companion. The project aims lead to the development of a social robot companion that can both express and promote curiosity and growth mindset.