STB: Intentional Stance Grounded Child-Dependent Robot

This paper reports on a children-dependent robotic approach to establish asynchronous child assistance with a social rapport network for the purpose of collecting trash from a public space. Our sociable trash box robot (STB) was unable to collect trash by itself. However, it did succeed in conveying its intentions to collect the trash from children. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effective social cues, behaviors, and other essential factors to facilitate children in their anticipation of the behavior of a sociable trash box robot. The STB engages by using interactive social cues and vocal interactions to build a social coupling with children in order to induce their assistance in collecting trash. We discuss the minimalism designing mechanism of the STB, as well as the effectiveness of the above factors through an experiment which is conducted in a child-centric environment.