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、学业成就和幸福感的认知认知和行为的三个核心方面是1)好奇心，2)心态和3)他们对挑战环境的适应能力。好奇心是促进一个人的学习欲望和内在动力的基石特征，尽管在学习过程中存在着无处不在的障碍，但仍要继续探索。固定或成长的心态对孩子的学业和社会成就有很大影响。两者都被证明是可塑性的，都容易受到社交互动的影响。最后，嵌入环境及其带来的挑战有助于塑造儿童对自己能力和技能的看法。儿童社交机器人伙伴在增强父母和教师在发展、学习和促进儿童的学业成就和福祉方面有着巨大的希望。虽然上述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融合了好奇心和心态的综合表现力认知架构，以实现儿童自主、吸引人和长期的机器人伴侣还不存在。拟议项目的长期目标是通过与社交机器人同伴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、具有表现力的认知-情感架构，通过协同整合人工好奇心、对心态的理解和富有表现力的社会行为的模型，以促进机器人同伴的最先进水平。第二个具体目标是通过进行一项为期6个月的纵向研究，让孩子们与机器人同伴玩耍和互动，来评估机器人同伴对儿童好奇心和心态的影响。该项目旨在开发一种社交机器人伴侣，既能表达并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.