Emotion-Responsive and Interactive Self-reconfigurable Robot for Children

The use of interactive robots in early education, harnessing their fascinating potential to enhance children’s play and learning experiences, is well-documented in the literature. Reconfigurable robots, on the other hand, have demonstrated their advantages over fixed-shaped robots in various domains. However, they have not yet been utilized as interactive companions for children. Integrating reconfiguration into interactive learning and playing robots adds a new dimension to their versatility and adaptability. This paper explores the use of a reconfigurable robot as an interactive playing and learning platform for children. In this context, a vision-based method was developed to perceive a child’s emotional state and head pose. Fuzzy logic was employed to determine the robot’s behavior based on the child’s emotional state and head pose variations. The robot’s movement speed, direction, configuration, and color were adjusted to interact with the user. The experimental results validate that the proposed method enables a reconfigurable robot to interact with a user based on variations in emotional levels.